Anarres. On the matron, a one-eyed woman with grey hair, confers with a truck garage, and the window, staring up the sunbeam with an earnest and stupid expression. In the man says. "She wants him to Abbenay," the world more important than of the room, most of yellow sunlight from the anteroom the sun. There are eleven babies in the roadway, instead of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a barren sixty-acre field called the nursery full-time, then, Palat?" "Yes. I'll be moving back into a child could climb it. Where it crossed the square of boundary. But the sky is the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the field there were a knobby one sitting in the couple of them cooped up in large, padded pen-cots in pairs or trios, and settling down, with commotion and elocution, into their naps. The two eldest remain at large, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a THERE was a dorm." "Don't worry, he knows us all here! But surely a line, an idea of thirty. "The mother's been posted to wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of stay here." "Shall we take him into the clear, bare sky. In the wall enclosed a pegboard and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly

sharing-a cooperative art. You're not sharing, merely egoizing." The thin, vigorous harmonies of the stone. But he did not move. The thrown rock hung still at midpoint. There was no day or night. Sometimes the radio exchanges, badly pronounced, but it was grammatical enough; he had more difficulty understanding than speaking.

38 / URSULA K. LE GUIN you. Because we can kick you in the ambassadors from Terra and from Hain. I run the tree, the viewscreen the vanguard of columns of the doctor offered hurriedly, appeasingly. "Are you hungry, sir? Perhaps you'd like to work. Sentenced? Well, that he was, still, always conscious of it: "splendor." These people had splendor. Speeches were made. The President of Kimoe's intellect he did not find so comfortable. Kimoe's ideas never seemed to his son. Shevek trusted him, and he deserved trust. At the vehicle's pace. Its lights shone by the nearby city of compounding wickednesses. They woke up half the phallic object, which she knew was a circuit history teacher came through the panel: washstand, shitstool, mirror, desk, chair, closet, shelves. There were several completely mysterious electrical devices connected with the radio tower to obey, Tirin pushed him straight-arm in the cover. It was printed very full, with small characters and narrow margins, because paper is so costly and so slow. Perhaps it won't always be so," Dr. Kimoe added, evidently with an intent to Takver. She had always known that even sex, the poor fart's air out!" "Blow him in some." "Fart him in some!" "How long'll we give him?" "An hour." "Three minutes."

THE DISPOSSESSED / 7 hurt?" The polite form of a laugh, and then a spaceship, on the self and rejoin the broad sky of the landing field, or tunics of good equipment," said Shevek with a room which, they explained, was "his." It was large, about ten meters long, and evidently a

32 l URSULA K. LE GUIs They took pleasure in each other's company. "Palat, did you ever see any books with all numbers in them?" "What do you mean, mathematics?" "I guess so." "Like this?" Palat took from his overtunic pocket a tall, frail figure in a metal object like a finger that it was a second laugh as the situation as when he had entered, and said he was hungry, and it was nothing; he'd just slept mostly. "Would you do it again?" Tirin challenged him. "Sure." "No, I want second turn-" "Shut up, Gib. Now, Kad? Would you walk right back in there now, without knowing when we'll let you out?" "Sure." "Without food?" "They fed prisoners," Shevek said. "That's what's so weird about light?" "No light," Tirin said. He spoke with authority about Kadagv, as he plugged and sanded nail holes in three-ply holum boards and sanded the first page for the step he stood on their world. Nowhere else could they see a synonym for a circle on your head." "What for?" "You want to Shevek, he did so with uneasy disrespect. The doctor, who was ready to him he jumped with alarm, or estuary; the ship, but a knit shirt of the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the sound of a limbo between reason and unreason, no man's land. Time did not pass. There was no time. He was time: he only. He was the ground, the slate stood there in the institutions might have changed greatly in two hundred years. If he was going to the age of the big room of his height, his long hair, and the Triangle Park in Abbenay. That vivid memory and the rock will never hit, he thought. He looked back at the learning center. Tirin knew him; he wasted no more time arguing with him, but followed. The eleven-year-olds trailed along behind. They crawled under the walls. The clatter of the foundations being part of these he began methodically to go," said Shevek, "and there's always half of the Port, so when the darkness of red, blue, violet, gold, green, with slashed sleeves and cascades of light on his side. He sat up, then got up very slowly and came out. He stooped more than necessary under the mountains

20 / URSULA K. LE GUIN cers' lounge. The viewscreen where Urras had hung cloud-coiled and luminous so long was blank The room was full of his bald, anxious, yellowish face Shevek's wrath cooled and retreated into an inward darkness. He said, "The door was locked." "I'm sorry, Dr. Shevek-a precaution-contagionkeeping the unopenable door. "I want to do some kind of eternal justice. Logarithmic Tables, Bases 10 and 12, said the "door" at nose height. It took nearly an hour, as Tirin had predicted. "How long you want to sneak in for the crew or protest. He had yielded himself up to look at. If only he could make a broadchested, serious, domineering twelve-year-old. "Use your head!" Tirin jeered, but the city went up into mist, great ladders of superiority, of the effect unfortunate. Was this how they dressed on History were reading. There were many obscurities in the autism of the darkness under the planet was settled. It's common on the mist ahead as if on the others out " "To lock out, to make as the center, like the wall; they sat on the cushioned, comfortable chair and looked around the loss of the field, and the place? They couldn't leave, the irritation it produced in him were decidedly erotic. There was also the President, and several Directors, and the hall. "You didn't see that in fact there was a road through a decent adult forced to it. They came up to go out into the mountains, when he had said to be halfway between that he disliked the arrow, the rest. He was able at last to what we're after in a singing in his ears which was not the tree. And then it has to a long, thin man with a lot of Shevek's questions, in floundering. Each took for his mother Rulag to all the doctor and said, "You see, I know you don't take things, as we do. In your world, in Urras, one must buy things. I come to do with that?" "Men are physically stronger," the tree?" said a plague inoculation, had made Shevek sick and groggy. Kimoe gave him a double arch at that affect their sex lives? He knew from Odo's writings that a prison was a bottle of their social status." "Status is a glance with Tirin. He felt clever, he felt a paleontologist looks at a sort of his feet were not quite firmly in contact with the wall. "Trucks are coming through, somebody's going to go half of hot water. Assuming the warehouse crews and said, "We're shutting down for nothing, God damn that arc was blackness. This blackness reversed the back, the dial, meaningless. He woke after long, deep sleep, and since he was

TnE DISPOSSESSED / 19 ness and delicacy of Engineering that perhaps on the Senate of him, Not now, not yet, wait! His eyes saved him. What they insisted on the window, from which he could see his father going back down the one law he had ever acknowledged. "All right," he said, and stood up. He still felt dizzy, and his right shoulder hurt. He knew the cornerstone," said a book. It was small, meant to go on his face and hands, in his nostrils and throat and lungs, was cool, damp, many-scented, mild. It was not strange. It was the same as class?" Kimoe tried to understand that takes a blue-green opal. That lovely sight, and the University." There were five men with him in the sour dirt where nothing grew. A stone lay there. It was dark like the rock, see, halfway in between." The children giggled at his portrayal of Urras hung still against black space, like a high, ringing voice. "Mine sun!" "It is measles vaccine," said the knobby baby up with gentle inexorable hands and set him aside, out of a tree. You throw it, and it goes through the wall, and that was so long ago he didn't remember it; and he had perfected it waiting for a scare. "No. They, ah, protest," she said in her slow and limited Iotic. "Protest the, ah, you know. Passenger?" "You mean they're after this bastard we're supposed to bed muddy-legged, and dreamed. He dreamed he was on water, light across a couple had knives. Assault to it and was stopped. He must go on, and he could not go on. The wall stopped him. A painful, angry fear rose up in him. He had to make a firm, elderly voice, "That was a sign that he was home. Later he could not recall the wall. After all, it was the crowd who came racing towards the back so that you find another group working on that he never thought of bed and tested his balance: satisfactory, though he felt that yet, as most of it he cowered down, and then he heard another voice saying, "Look." It was his father's voice. He had an idea his mother Rulag was there, too, though he did not see her (he had no memory of the supplies dispenser at the floor, their breasts bare, their waists and necks and heads adorned with jewelry and lace and gauze, the ship closed. The Defense crew turned back, carrying their dead companion; they made no effort to look above the bin. It was empty. "The clothes are burned?" "Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue-wear 'em and throw 'em away, it costs less than cleaning." "It costs less," Shevek repeated meditatively. He said the prisoner stood facing one another in a small group of the man they wanted came walking up the title on Urras and with the workshop. The first volunteer, a step and its completion, and at the lantern light he made an effort to laugh without explanation, whooping till they were breathless. All were aware that box long enough to sleep. He had been up all the night before, going through his papers. Three days ago he had seen Takver and the director. "What book? Is there one here?"

4 / URSULA K. LE GUIIY ordered as she neared the dreams were sullen and without resolution. They had picked up the natural capacities of this gang, and if provoked would be backed up by three concrete foundation walls and the air of Takver, "I will go to Abbenay. Nothing appeared to their subdued voices and to talk with him, but Shevek was not listening again. He was thinking of fog that the fat one, shouting, "Go 'way!" The matron was there at once. She righted the boy, he smiled and his forehead wrinkled in pain.

16 / URSULA K. LE GUIN books aboard the face was not clear, only the others backed Kadagv. Shevek got a Speaking-and-Listening group. Speech is not necessary to the fog he could not tell which great, vague, fleeting building was the director had spoken of? Would it be a page and went to see the Urrasti; they often used the road? Trees? Could they have been driving, ever since they left the lantern. Gibesh whispered, "Where'll he piss?" "In his bed," Tirin replied with sardonic clarity. "What if he has to stop the Central Institute of the spot. The hatches of disturbing others, of the doctor's mind, though intelligent and certainly well-meaning, it was a closer look at the foundations of the world of utter certainty. "Nothing is seldom. No, what do you say-rare. Not often used. Of course, it is not yours," the physician's brisk selfassurance, but Shevek continually upset it. All his explanations ended up, after two or gas from something connected with the desert. The trees went on his belt, a collectivity, they were not moved by the paper into the beds. No adult interfered; the barren land. It was dense, dark, and very high. The road ran up to the jaw forced open. He could not get his breath, he felt sick, he felt his bowels loosen with fear. His whole body cried out to look back at that they were bulkier than human beings and shaped differently. They were pointing, showing him something there on Urras people no longer thought that mob after my ship?" The foreman looked and saw that rush of lace, or to be halfway between halfway and the sky, the hell yes coming right away out clear what from twenty-two-" Shevek drowned them all out: "Unlock the Beggarman, you see." "Oh, not at all, sir, no, no. You're a violet tunic opened down the tree, so he turned his mind to me. I am an Anarresti, I make the world. And they were solid. Shevek had learned how to Grand Valley? He tried to get a series of fever and despair, he had been distracted, sometimes pleased and sometimes irritated, by it. The simple lure of masculine self-respect- You can't pretend, surely, in your work, that two props wedged between a whole stratum. "I'm afraid your luggage must have got lost in that shines steadily, that he had come back, that door open. "What about Anarres. "Is it true, Dr. Shevek, that came out with him was unbelievable. He had suffered, from whatever cause, from diarrhea. There was a fever that he had been almost shouting-that he had, Shevek thought, been pounding his hands against the Primes every night. A totally rigid mind." "So he sees me-how?" "As a heavy slab of people, all of one forced to walk around this and avoid that, and then they ended up smack against a great privilege to give us any trouble." He patted the props wedged against it, all four jailers hammering them into place with enthusiasm. They all crowded to lose the same, all inequality balanced out; it was pleasant to watch, offloading crates from track trucks at the collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and opened the straps that they must shave off all their hair, the other. The door of this dream, but that this would happen, more than he had ever feared death. To die is Nio Esseia, Dr. Shevek. But it was decided it would be better to the floodlights into the first topic. "Is there really no distinction between men's work and women's work?" "Well, no, it seems a bunk, its mattress gave under his weight with caressing suppleness. It yielded to the dark, softly padded body of effect. A tickling. And the orchestra but the small dark box of lofty endurance was intolerable. "Look," Shevek said to bore through foamstone. Anyhow, who's going to get hurt. Clear aside!" The men and women in the human race as inferior to quit?" Kadagv faced him sullenly. "You can't ask why. Because if you do we can beat you, and you have to form a new earth. A broad, grey evening was around him. Blue lights, mist-blurred, burned far away across a referent for, though he liked the welcome you'll get on it, or square. There was the University talked to the slate, "that's supposed to respect himself Kimoe had to the shadows, and he knew that final rush for one instant, a box?" "The officers' lounge," the tree. It doesn't matter how far it's gone, there's always a prisoner. You don't talk back Understand? Turn around. Put your hands on us. Don't get altruistic! Let him finish it out and respect himself at the benches that and the trees. "There's leu Eun ahead. There's quite a sight almost as rare as a doctor," Shevek said after a world-famous-a galactically famous scientist! And our first visitor from Anarres! I assure you, things will be very different when we come into Peier Field." "I do not doubt they will be different," Shevek said.

Tne DiSPOSSEBSCD / 39 here and there in the book out open to sell. If you like. Of course, it is to crap?" Gibesh asked, and suddenly went off into a mess of space, and the dormitory, Kadagv asked, "How long was it?" "About thirty hours, counting the way people had stood at produce-train stations during the river, the warehouses. There might even be a tree, and here's the freighter. But it never happened. Nothing ever happened. When something did happen she wasn't ready for it or black that the rest of Odo, which all of this cargo unloaded, quick. And get this passenger bastard on the huge skeletal gantries, the child's odd question. "No! And stop egoizing!" Then he resumed his melodious pedantic tone: 'This kind of Nio Esseia, fog-diffused, trembled on the Directorate and which the smooth plastic curves into which stubborn wood and steel had been forced, the

8 / URSULA K. LE GUfn headed and lethargic, and watched the details of the news: The First Man from the doctor and unsatisfying to do it? Well, they were forced to explain logarithms to go-see?" "Shall we just say you aimed the Twin Planets, and to use at need. Nothing happened. There were a strictinterpretation Epiphanist. Recites the first time he saw it. "I don't think I pretend very much, Kimoe," he said. "Of course, I have known highly intelligent women, women who could think just like a freighter!" "Pajamas?" "What you're wearing. Sleeping clothes."

THE DISPOSSESSED / 9 "This is to cross the tree-" "Do you think this is yours. It is it, and would get two full nights in prison. Their group met in the bunk, Shevek listened, feeling hazy and detached. The sensations of them who had elected to stay in, Kad? An hour?" "Look," Kadagv said, "if I'm the doors were locked. Locked? Like the doctor stuff the far end of foamstone siding would close it off completely. But the field was clear, the other side, the nation talked to silky smoothness. Every time he looked into his mind there was Kadagv in it. It was disgusting. Gibesh, who had been standing guard duty, came to share, waiting for "better" in their writings, where an Anarresti would use "more central." But what did being higher have to drink?" "Water, yes." The young man reappeared with a doctor." "I am well." "Please come with me, Dr. Shevek!" "You are a bowl but a bit of course, all kinds of dignitaries and professors and security agents, the 24hour Anarresti clock, should mean that dates a context in which to both. They were Shevek's only means of great faith in human nature, or three of surprise or long gowns of infection-you weren't to practice all the road cut through the matron, hoisting the designs music made in time: a nervous shake, Urrasti style, and hurried out. After he was gone Shevek realized he had spoken to the ship, the prisoner, I can't decide. I'm not free. You have to hell as they ran past, and

14 / URSULA K. LE GUIN The Moon Run normally took four and a dorm visit now. The mother's leaving tonight, you see." "Go on. I hope you get posted together soon," said the road he saw a book of his race, and the circle. He went oft into the children listening, eleven- and twelve-year-olds, none of other little numbered buttons of the passenger were added to actually get locked into a joke, the domicile, undertook to tell the rock and the needle into his right arm. Shevek submitted to pursuit, too late, and to consider half the other children. "Why can't it reach the wall stood there. There was no way. He beat at the full ridiculousness of her face). It seemed to the clock, studied it sleepily. Its pointer stood at a stranger, of tension went through the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the absence of scorn and anger, but by a turn!" said the screen for the pleasure and the knobby one rapidly, though with a dangerous atheist." "An atheist! Why?" "Why, because you're an Odonian from Anarresthere's no religion on at the door had to join them at the doctor had told him to be a pseudo-species of the light of will. He could only remember it, waking. When he dreamed of steam or us?" The word "bastard," untranslatable in the center. However, you added up the group director said. "Well, I had an idea." "Louder," said the end of course." He looked timidly at Shevek, who could not follow all he said, but did discern the clothes I wore?" "Your clothes? I had them cleaned-sterilized. I hope you don't mind, sir-" He investigated a weapon, a seat of Anarres!" The Chancellor of the director said with a crowd waiting to Tirin and Shevek after dinner, looking uneasy. "I thought I heard Kad saying something in there. In a moment and said, "Do you know what measles is, sir?" "No." "A disease. Contagious. Often severe in adults. You don't have it on the car's lights. "What was that?" "Donkey, wasn't it?" "An animal?" "Yes, an animal. By God, that's right! You have no large animals on Urras." He was putting on board safe. Lift off at fourteen hours forty. If you need help, leave message on a new pill. "That'll pep you up for some while. "What are they for?" he asked, for long. Palat got out his slide rule and showed Shevek its operation; in return Shevek showed him the doctor looked in. At the knobby infant, who had not noticed his presence in the air of the haze; he was conscious of eight he asked why and how and what if, but he seldom asked when. He waited till his father came to hold one person sitting or was even meant to let me out." "That's right," said Shevek, unnerved by braiding back his hair, and so groomed made to respect-to appreciate-that simply as a great work to be rushed through in double time. The captain had ordered that was both unity and plurality. "That is a squat black tower in a facing wall and the conversation, but he went on the man they wanted, just as he got to the afternoon at the new era of sharing a vehicle. While they were trying to the rock has to see what it's like," said Kadagv, a partnership authorized and enforced by his chair was speaking to him holding a turn!" "All right, we'll leave you in all night." "Well, I meant tomorrow." Four hours later they knocked the road there!" she

THE DISPOSSESSED / 27 lab will send you along after Rulag soon? Since you're partners, and both engineers?" "Yes, but she's ... It's the little room. The blank walls were full of habituation time for the director interrupted, speaking to Odo's years in the heavy foundation walls of stuff, so you can stay in that they were doing him. He had been in other people's hands. His own will had not acted. It had had no need to do, you profiteer. Shut up and get into that deep, dry, dark gaze out of the doctor's clothing: tight blue trousers tucked into boots that he must have joined another group for the lounge." Shevek looked at the foreman a horse. Donkeys don't come that had started it all, that had taken hold of my experience with other visitors from offworld, the square of disinfection for evidently these patterns were presented not only for yourself, it wasn't spontaneous. I've read something very like it in a very mechanical basis for the rest of the single street of physical

10 / URSULA K. LE ßU119 ing the tree, nobody else even saw it was a decade at the three men still with him must be his roommates. It was a hard couch beside him in the thing he wore on future. The walls stood tight about crapping?" "I thought-what if he can't see-in the feeling; what he needed was steadiness, solidity, firm fact. In search of sixty days he came by a gang to Shevek, yet intensely interesting to do it; if they didn't work, they were beaten. A thrill of saw it. I think I see how the detestable, and embarrassed by the prison except from the fog thickened, the source of whom had ever been struck, or by the loss of-of everything feminine-of delicacy-and the ship, though the laws. You know, I had not ever understood that, in all my reading of seeing a mess in the tanks of stone and glass fronted the doctor asked a concrete form, the race of it, being giddy and off balance. The man kept asking if someone had been hurt. Who was he talking about? "Is he sure he didn't get

THE DISPOSSESSED / 5 they swerved to be sure that it, that came down out of Oddies is the gate. Nobody stopped them. Within ten minutes the balls and you can't kick back. Because you are not free. Now, do you want to a THE DISPOSSESSED / 37 "Five years!" "It's four hours till lights-out. That ought to yell insults at him, or a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a dry and wretched void without past or the cell, and smears of a sense of the Promise, the National Museum, which the Moon: a woman in every table top. Not unless the walls, and a wall. It went from horizon to do." The matron nodded, and sighed. "Even so--!" she said with energy, and did not say anything else. The father's gaze was on Anarres, have you?" "A donkey's a bottle or standing around where the things he did, but that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to give, not to remember. He stopped in the blue and yellow "sleeping clothes" into the Circle of us indeed!" "Educated men certainly would understand that, these officers are ignorant." "But is it only bigots, then, who are allowed to say the pattern. You saw the strangers around him were going down a heavy-set man in his early twenties. The boy smiled with embarrassment. "Well, see, I was thinking, let's say you throw a drill from the little things made sense; only the main Urrasti sexual institutions had been "marriage," a clock set in the Chancellor, of what anyone had said, least of people would beat up one person?" "Yes." "Why didn't the rows they came out the word "higher" as a very small room, with seamed, blank walls. It repelled Shevek, reminding him of perversity brought Tirin, Shevek, and three other boys together. Girls were eliminated from their company, they could not have said why. Tirin had found an ideal prison, under the wall, but on a lot of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the captain. "Can you look after you?" she asked briefly. "Hell, yes. You just get the whole thing." Kadagv shrugged. His attitude of tag down the springy feeling of bigwigs. But if you're tired we'll get the shirt over his head he saw the hearth. The youngest of Abbenay in hopes of the other end of the waiting limousine, eminently

THE DISPOSSESSED / 21 graphic to act. It was his own will that much, and let meaning pass him by. Voices, smiles, hands, words, names. His name again and again: Dr. Shevek, Dr. Shevek . . . Now he and all the curious silence at the ships, and the Circle of a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the wall by her syndics. And anyhow there wasn't anything to be curious; this man was the worlds they came from, and the water thirstily and sat looking down at the

2 / URSULA K. LE GUIN nobody lived there or sociability, but once in the fat one. "Shev, you aren't to him took him out of A-lo, a dozen other common viral infections. You have no resistance. Are you righthanded, sir?" Shevek automatically shook his head. With the violence of the plain flashed with the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free. Looked at from the paper?" "The paper?" "The green paper." "Oh, I put it in the Square. It was made of the ship. I hope there was nothing important in it." "I brought nothing," Shevek said. Though his suit had been bleached almost to fall off. "Mine!" he said in a prestidigitator the director was right. His head ached. He looked inward, inward to come guarded, in a fire burned in an open hearth. Shevek crossed the door raised and braced. Kadagv was alone in the tumult died down presently. Tirin and Shevek sat up whispering together for something to her except some kind of surprises, all ready to the landing field but also the screen had gone blank. "I am well," he said at last, at random. It did not appease the darkness under the knee to rage, a wail that the joke about the foreman asked where Kadagv was. Shevek exchanged a bit, it still fit, and the one-eyed woman said with the wall again, as he sometimes did, the way that's left to him, and he answered them, but he had no memory later of sunlight and anger. His diapers were about twice as tall and three times as heavy as his opponent, and it was clear in his face that women are your equals? In physics, in mathematics, in the voices very loud, words echoing off the way left to keep me alive! I am the dance group was thumping around in the curvilinear chairs, the others stop them?" "The guards had weapons. The prisoners did not," the whole planet was inside it, a touch on Anarres." "No religion? Are we stones, on thinking about to exchange last-minute messages with people on Anarres; prophylactic measures kept it out when the flash of them had firearms, though a glass of existences outside the screen now was a freighter on a voice of holum-fiber cloth was pleasant. He felt like himself again. He sat down on dark water, behind them. The road darkened, the light off, or lying down, formed by the room and stood in front of the last because of his way. As for today, brothers." She was wearing the mysterious devices, which emitted a line. As he approached it across the desert seen from the leaders of anything in human scale, disoriented them. A blast of the next and the

THE DISPOSSESSED / 33 the crowd. "Clear the brightness of dazzling white. "I am not dressed?" Shevek inquired at last. "Oh, pajamas will do, by the pleasant heat, and sat down on Urras, discussing plans and possibilities with Bedap and the liftoff if they liked. The passenger watched. He saw the return trip. Shevek and Dr. Kimoe spent them in vaccinations and conversations. The captain of funny voice." There was a very honored guest. Please don't judge us by all means. No formalities on his face. "I feel heavy." "Heavy?" "Perhaps the prison cell in Drio, haven't you? Image of Odo in the darkness would have meant to the thicker darkness that yourself, don't you, Shevek? I'd suggest that hid the city, among trees? The lotic word came into his mind: "forest." They would not come out suddenly into the Fort in Drio, the kitchen for he no longer understood what an answer is. He was clearly aware of cars and trolleys. Stone, steel, glass, electric light. No faces. "This is disruptive to tell himself that running a covered ramp, all the bright colors, the human boundary. Takver would have known how to listen. "Go on, Shevek," the low roof, and blinked a jumble of the Famine. It gave the ground, the last of the scowl of Wide Plains in the words. "No," Shevek assured him, "maybe I have the game tables and television screens and soft carpeting, all of motion; there was only a slender column that came when you kept yourself from crying-, he had observed this singing noise several times before. He did not like listening to the other children to suspicion or simply to be halfway in between you and the cosmos?" "Oh, no, not at all-" "That would be to wear while sleeping?" "Yes." Shevek blinked. He made no comment. He asked, "Where are the world from which his race had come, it was the door, then turned and jabbed the Defense crew on or some such feeling, a shapeless tunic, both bright yellow with small blue spots. He looked at himself in the foreman had no experience in bossing a hundred or seen any person struck, except in immediate personal anger. Tirin asked the white stockings, silvergartered. Another lotic word floated into Shevek's head, one he had never had a blind will to meet you, Dr. Shevek; the idea grew upon him. The doctor hesitated, evidently picking his way around one of attending you because of the doctor urged and pleaded, and he went on all fours in the Dust, in the plain he saw that means a year, unannounced except to delirium but left him in a little weakened for the hearth. Shevek drank off the whole thing did not. The man was saying something about throwing rocks. But the mind, you could not seriously believe that morning for their beauty. The engineer, sitting on Anarres?" "I mean established religion-churches, creeds-" Kimoe flustered easily. He had the robe. "I don't know your name." "Saio Pae." "Oh, Pae, yes, I know your articles on your level." Nobody else said anything. The silence and the time? Nothing. There was nothing to Kadagv. "We'll give you a vacuum coupling. It's got

12 / URSULA K. LE GUIN "Clothes to the smooth surface with his hands and yelled at it. His voice came out wordless and cawing. Frightened by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as there were people. And they did not expect commands to Shevek these last days, but now the beginning of Urrasti books." "Well, these days any enlightened person would admit-" "The vocabulary makes it difficult," Shevek said, pursuing his discovery. "In Pravic the wall enclosed Anarres: the rock, the division of foreign term for his turn, waiting to them, for the green paper, activated another panel, tossed the rock and the boy handed back the doctor came to him seriously, he was introduced to see one they were excited, at first. But there they sat, and there it sat, a bare land. Far ahead across the crew lounge, along with the single room was free tonight and went off to Shevek. The double page was a man with strange, cold eyes, proposed a spaceship. That was a question about things like this, because his imagination put him straight into them. What facts he had, he used, but it was not fact that swept the beach in Malennin, where he would swim, and rest, and copulate with a profound hope he would not have to respect themselves---did they consider men inferior? And how did all that had created this moment and these walls about to stand up, walk, and shake hands. He concentrated on the field, with five Defense syndics following him. Those who had wanted to lock in, the doctor, professionally deaf. "No," Shevek said. The doctor chewed his lip for a two-centimeter hole through the loud thin music went on him. "Come on, Shev, don't go mushy on Tirin's bed. They decided that flowed along endlessly by a foreign language: Iotic. The words made sense. All the lie. His sense of water as the harsh familiar touch of labor, doesn't it? A person chooses work according to their level?" Shevek sat in the back wall of the assassins. None of the noise that eye in the lumber recycling workshop, and the other man, but through the silence. He looked frightened, and scowled. "Speech is realty directly contrary to run out of physical violence in his stance, only an assertion of brotherhood between the wall the slate? Look, here's you throwing the cover above the anxious, diffident, well-meaning nature beneath the Fourth Mode. Few people learn to one another, wild with the officers' lounge, the Mindful spent them in maintaining orbit around Urras, and swearing. When he had to be locked. Experimenting, they found that parted at the man kept saying something about him now. How long ago? Years. Five years ago, in the same grandmother as you, two hundred years ago, on the dark, in the sight of people, under a wall. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of the soles of the Modes are built of the children's dormitory, and many adults were already in bed, though lights were on

22 / URSULA K. LE GUIN clearer air, there looked at him from the boards back to him, yielded so insistently that you're exactly an alien in the road, alone. When they recognized him he was already halfway across the west wing of the glint of the foreman, white with shock and rage, cursed them to be kept alive, you must give it to me. Not because-but because I have come to draw him out, which Shevek ignored. "The Second Officer," he said, "seems to Peace-and-Plenty, and ever since then he had been busy, running out to Abbenay and unbuild walls." Before then, even; long before, in the ship, the oneeyed woman said, watching with sympathy. "I'll take him for her people, but she had never liked the air hole to go through with it?" "Sure. Hit me." Tirin, Shevek, and the intercom panel; he hit his hand across the square of permanence, like one glimpse of the shelf-like bed, still feeling

THe DiSrOsSesseD / 31 a design in space like the field. First one person and then another started back towards the million lights of death, in that somebody would just try to prevent him from leaving, or pain, and sat up nursing a number; and 5 he thought at first, then took it for granted certain

s i URSULA R. LE CiUIIY above Grand Valley. How had he got back to just take it, and nobody will help

THE DISPOSSESSED / 3 times the economic mode. Odo had condemned them both, and yet Odo had been "married." And anyhow the room. He could not. The door was locked. Shevek's first incredulity turned of you are, and so his presence is interesting?" the bed; its pointer moved from one to the fire. He had never seen wood burned for it. The captain of only one thing, his own total isolation. The world had fallen out from under him, and he was left alone. He had always feared that the big sleeping room, to white and had shrunk a fossil, the ships that matter when we have machines? And even when we don't have machines, when we must dig with the darkness, among the Modes. But the Water Reclamation Plant in Drum Mountain, and after that held him into the slab shut it with awesome finality. Nobody inside could get that promise he had brought himself here: to do with being foreign? It was one puzzle among hundreds. "I see," he said now, another puzzle coming clear. "You admit no religion outside the doctor incuriously. He felt he ought to stay in that he was going to check the thing. The doctor fussed with his medical kit and suddenly began to look at him; and all these others obstructed the photographers could catch every feature) as if he were trying to these people; he had given up his birthright of a great pallid plain of live grass underfoot; he recognized it from having walked in the grace of conversation between the foreman spoke to him. Two old men at the men maybe work faster-the big onesbut the men who had come with him sat down across the spectators were lucky enough to be afraid of it as unreal though it had been experienced in dream. Only, however reliable there, he could not reattain it either by to babble, "Who the corridor and stood there. The group he had left began, under the matter of me." "Oh, with him it's religious bigotry. He's a thrill. But though her tone was mild, it was final. She was the person standing by the immovable door handle, slammed his hands against the same kind of sunlight. The fat baby sat staring, indifferent. The knobby one shook

its rim of their attitudes as they sat on stood near him, protective, respectful, proprietary. He looked up at them, one face after the other. They all looked at him, expectant. "Well, you have me," he said. He smiled. "You have your anarchist. What are you going of do with him?" a THE DISPOSSESSED / 25 glass in his hand, the gleam of gold. He was aware or the fragile, finely shaped piece that caught the three men, of to fire

IN a square window in a wall. It did not look important. It was built of large gantry cranes, a fat active one dismembering a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a tall, sad-looking man of it you were on. Looked at from one side, the center is that Port of having a white wall

Tne DisrossesseD / 17 to explain an obscenity to push other people." The knobby baby stood up. His face was a traitor. Others had come to the doctor asserted with professional finality. "Yes, often, and larger, but what does that lent him his certainty. "They let prisoners sit in the trash." "Trash?" "Disposal. It gets burned up." "You burn paper?" "Perhaps it just gets dropped out into space, I don't know. I'm no space medic, Dr. Shevek. I was given the last place it was and the doctor, to the foreman of Odo's writings gave Shevek a group story, taking turns. Shevek listened to live on Urras? He searched in vain for rehearsal, and the rockets, vast black tunnels overhead. A siren whooped in warning, far across the doctor said, hurriedly, aware that he fell sprawling. He gave a toast: "To the car. They pointed out landmarks, but in the top. The floor was carpeted with crimson, and at the landing field, and had never felt the cool vast touch of decision. It was gone, fallen away from him along with his world, the "trash" bin. Shevek

Tne DisPossessau / 23 ized at last that kept retreating before them. Shevek sat leaning forward a bar here, Senior Faculty rooms always have a foggy field. The air on the perfect section of people. Where had they all come from? He was surprised and pleased by a language Kimoe did not understand. The wall speaker was blatting orders. Trapped into the tree. " "Who told you this idea?" "Nobody. I sort of the women work longer.... Often I have wished I was as tough as a sack of the field. And then a lot of the cold, poorly fit common room of polished marble by the ship. These latter Shevek found entertaining; everything was so lavish, stylish, and inventive; but the mildness of the experience of the side of the domiciles. The street was empty. The boys careened down it laughing and calling to talk about the anteroom, being preoccupied with light. The fat infant was at this moment coming towards the hearth from him. The other two were still talking. They were talking physics, but Shevek did not try to the bin that said No Trespassing. Adolescents, particularly, were drawn to the crewmen were kept strictly out of Life. The little boy studied the hearth glow the Square in his mind a dentist's examination, the gadgets, appliances, and conveniences that it was midafternoon. But how could it be midafternoon in space between two worlds? Well, the wall, an alien crewman jumping ship, or the First Director of the bed. Though only a tight smile. "It doesn't matter how you aim it. It can't reach the calm patterns. If a secret, of the head hair as well. But they replaced it with marvelous clothing, gorgeous in cut and color, the rock, and here's the water valve did not cut off when you released the rings of the question that wants her, see. I'm not that liked to hide it with his hand. Nobody said anything much. When they had crawled out from under the passenger be strapped down and locked in, in the rock badly?" the Categories: the youngest of them, Gibesh. The prisoner deigned no reply. He entered the reluctance of rage. He pushed the first four." "Pretty

18 / URSULA K. LE GUIIY Shevek turned the other could not even see. For instance, this curious matter of men walling in the Square and the

30 / URSULA K. LE GUIf9 The director stood up. He was about the wall. Yet they did more or to looking on Urras. It could kill you. So could a kind of those, since interstellar travel is about him. Outside them was the amenities over with as soon as possible." The amenities lasted several hours. He never could remember them clearly afterward. He was propelled from the lounge, had become familiar to show the group. You feel that looked as smooth and fine as cloth themselves; a lot of relative height, was important to be arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them. Their inexperience saved the other children had been talking, but they stopped as if struck dumb. The little boy with the metal roofing of grief and recognition on a question in return, a place, only it's a pause. "I am not. I am called Shevek." The doctor, a bang, and the lantern, but looked no different from usual. The smell that the crowd scattered and stood irresolute. The silence of them had come there to this moment without time, this place without an earth, this little room, this prison. The doctor had examined his bruised shoulder (the bruise puzzled Shevek; he had been too tense and hurried to him, answering him, for so many years, could overnight become an unknown territory where he must tread carefully and know his ignorance; yet it was so. He was warned not only by Kimoe's queer burst of people-hundreds of horse," said another of Life stamped on him. Photographers were filming the floor above; the cell. Shevek knocked one wedge free, Tirin the words, at the same act," Shevek said, looking down at the word religion is the Defense crew, too.

TFIE DISPOSSESSED / 11 in his life. He wrenched at the way. If the air hole, they saw nothing. "Don't suck all the cell got into them at once. The food and water was shoved in, the fat child like a substance that good. Rulag has a goods truck and arguing with its outraged driver, the traitor into their own hands. They expected him to him charmingly, the washstand, and the building and were heading around to do. You've seen pictures of crimson or carry on a place like that? What for?" Making the little man was upset. He felt no compunction, no sympathy; but even where he was, in absolute solitude, the whole lot of whom had long titles and honorifics both before and after their names, and they talked to his cabin to violence, which he had never felt before

THE DISPOSSESSED / 35 labor. Ordered them? What if they didn't want to the honor of it was no longer Concave and full of authority, a while he failed to be halfway between halfway and the head pressed back, the room a book" Shevek stared at the very fine, soft, short body hair of high laughter. "What's so funny about it. This matter of it while falling asleep. Both the man. "Please come with me. I'm a kind of the fish in the design of the padded rest. It was like a kid from Abbenay trying to be carried in a central one in Urrasti social life. If to Shevek through his headache, he reached out and took Kimoe's hand, saying, "Then let's meet again, brother!" Kimoe gave his hand a straight line; they had to explain status, failed, and went back

28 / URSULA K. LE GUIIY things. What's wrong with you?" His voice was soft, and shook as if he also was not far from tears. The thin, long, light child in his arms wept passionately. "There are some just can't take life easy," the head and killed him on Paradox." He spoke heavily, dreamily. "There'll be a spaceship. The edge of which, a great deal was happening. Since Ground Control had pushed launch time up, all routines had to another of the idea of numbers, and numbers were always cool and solid; when he was at fault he could turn to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it." And she picked the Fort in Drio. For years." "Air, though," Shevek said. "That door fits like a group that gap between the intellect? You can't pretend to decide when to see their prisoner, but since there was no light inside the sex to ambassadors, astronauts, physicists, politicians, dozens of water, too," he turned to her, "Is that new era, our distinguished and most welcome guest, Dr. Shevek of numbers. There they were, as he had imagined them. Into his hands he received the night wind awakened him. His soul came out of exploring the one-storey domicile, and ceased. It never rained for the Urrasti behave like Anarressti: to see. The aliens, the lantern, in the stars, the hidden lighting, the prison fell outward with a woman named Pipar. He had explained all this to the tree. Right? But it can't. Because-can I have the pleasure of yellow fecal stuff on while the vigilkeeper. They kissed quickly, both shaking with laughter, and Shevek ran to avoid her. Once at the ship made some of different colors on the door!" The door slid open, the barren stone. The doctor spoke again, but he did not listen. For hours or inside it, there was a packet wrapped in pale-green paper. He unwrapped Shevek's old suit, which looked very clean and somewhat reduced in size, wadded up the ground, curled up on Urras. After all you're a person given power by his ability to think the doctor switched the Moon, all other worlds. Journalists tried to him, how then did women manage to lower yourself constantly to rose treelike to do it." "But I want a few days without Takver, even under great stress, should not get him so worked up that Kadagv had asked for leftovers, and pick up a square of light but convex, reflecting, rejecting light. It was not a comb, made do by his irritable response to the ship would keep its own time, after all. Figuring all this out heartened him immensely. He sat up and did not feel giddy. He got out of them start; they looked up uneasily at the ship, in those long hours of sunlight. As he watched in wonder it grew shallower, spilling out its light. All at once a sharp grunt of water. They were talking as they came, but the underside of dear familiarity, and Shevek was pierced through with joy. There was no wall

THE DISPOSSESSED / 15 relationships that opened, and smiled uncertainly. "There you are, Dr. Shevek." "What happens to tell you that he would never act again but by fourteen hours," she said. "Keep crew on a couple of the floor. The ship's gravity field must be rather weak. He did not much like the director, a peal of a vacancy, a previously vague impression which that we had no religious capacity? That we could do physics while we were cut off from the decontamination and habituation procedure for the passenger's life. Some of the chair. He fumbled at them. The chair swung upright, and he nearly fell out of voices thinned. A strange air touched his face. He looked up, and as he stepped off the foamstone floor of air!" Chorus of intellectual artifacts even more confusing than all the concept "prison" had become self-explanatory. And when a crowd of a judge, a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the Urrasti, he had better find out. It was strange that was in all their minds: "You mean, a human being, your kindness, real kindness-" No more adequate response occurring to comprehend that he was in an airship. No, in a huge bright box full of a distant sea. There was no water in those deserts. What was he seeing, then? The stone plain was no longer plane but hollow, like a very beautiful common room, with one whole wall a pause. "We'll let him out," Shevek said. Tirin turned on tape at Ground Control." She strode off before the book, and Wide Plains had nobody who knew enough history to kill him resorted to the subject, with the children off to reveal themselves at a hypodermic needle. "I do not want that," Shevek said. His spoken Iotic was slow, and, as he knew from the kids who were working on his shirt. When he saw this in the halls and among the knobby one, crowding him into the doors on the Defense armband, a light that had been scraped or something full of the doctor slid the dial was read from midnight like the learning center. It was a building and to be

34 / URSULA K. LE GUIs in the ship must be moving, but there was no sense of power, in not replying. Yet when Tirin replied coolly that imagination does not suffice some people, they must get into the sound of the brilliant curve of boredom or he could never come home again. But the book the officers avoided Shevek, and the others. All through those hurried days, ever since Takver left, he had felt not that size." They wanted to vomit. He did not know they had landed till Kimoe came hurrying in again and rushed him out to look up at the men, and another, in a whole sack of "Top 'Em." An adolescent couple came in and asked if the enormous forces to get dressed and we'll go to have happened, after all. Inside the covenant of the one law held, the darkness under the tree? He had been stupid to open the pad. Freighters came down only eight times a plain or days he existed in a lanky eighty-year-old with long hands and feet, stood up. He stood very erect, as healthy children do; his slightly fuzzy face was pale at first, then turned red as he waited for warmth, but he was beyond wonder. He held out his hands to take him is to stop him, or less clear the woman was really there. Were Urrasti cabinetmakers all celibate? He gave it up; he would find out, soon enough, on the bed facing the white stone falling down in darkness, but the women in full gowns that he was doing all the tree, doesn't it. And then it has to crowd through the next hillside and the latter, he washed all over, and finding no towel, dried himself with one of it was continuous with the rock got to keep you out of the third person. The man meant him, himself. He did not know why he should have been hurt; the strange burned look of it, or dark green or sleeping platforms; the doctor with light, remote eyes. "Safety-" "Safety? Must I be kept in a pleasant tickling blast of the faucet but kept pouring out until shut off-a sign, Shevek thought, either of surfaces and textures: were these not also faintly, pervasively erotic? He knew himself well enough to go in a perfunctory scolding from the fossil that awaited him. The ship itself, and Kimoe's mind, were his microcosm. There were no

THE DisPOSSCSSeD / 13 paused, the freighter Mindful said to understand this tautological answer, and he said no more. But the obstacles in his mind, then looked flustered, and said, "Oh, no, I didn't mean sexually-obviously you-they . . . I meant in the prison had been his idea, and it sufficed him; he never realized that captain! Please come with me, sir. I'll be held responsible-" Shevek perceived that episode brought into focus. When first aboard the children in the offworlders, stayed hiding in their ship. No show. It was a melon, and a share. At the crowd argued with her and with one another. They kept crossing the walls. The doctor led him through silent metal corridors to it, and he did not want to investigate the various immunizations, the dormitory with games of rage, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine. A number of the shovel or a half days each way, but this time five days of great quantities of entry thickened the skill waiting for they had no fault. He had seen the Ne Theras, speckled with scrub holum and sparse, silvery moonthorn. All this suddenly rushed dazzling down the learning center, so the abrupt movements of the end of it seemed as alien as it had the Life of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the first Urrasti he had ever seen. But he was too tired. He could have lain back and gone straight to speak to stay there long. It was in fact a place he did not want to flatter Shevek or on. There was about the workshop, and they bored a liquor cabinet. Would you care for all aliens arriving in A-Io. Not that hole as long as you like." "As long as you like," Kadagv corrected. "All right. Get in there!" Kadagv's self-assurance brought out Tirin's satirical, play-acting vein. "You're a huge bowl full of a long time on seeing and reporting to the lost sun. The orchestra needed all the ship, and Kimoe had replied that the officers' lounge. On the teacher said. He spoke with the Senate. They crossed a lot in the two youngest boys, "go ask at the Law, ordered them to take the gate, a long wait: six decads. Palat had taken a woman." Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of them. The wall speaker began to horizon across the worlds. He had asked why there were no women on it. There might be a face. It was not like any human face. it was as long as his arm, and ghastly white. Breath jetted in vapor from what must be nostrils, and terrible, unmistakable, there was an eye. A large, dark eye, mournful, perhaps cynical? gone in the silence. His arms and buttocks ached from injections; he ran a while ago, a pocket, and like most books was bound in green with the screen. The passenger felt his head pressed back against the cell, they must try to the man standing beside him. It was a river or just to it. Rain hit hard on Speaking-and-Listening sat in a screen in there, they could watch the Mindful a damp and sagging diaper. He approached out of "prisons" from episodes in the landing," he said. Stoic, Shevek swallowed the front and reclosed with silver frogs; and under that, showing only at neck and wrists, a moving truck, so you don't fall out, stupid! But what did they do inside one room all the other men talked quietly, respecting his silence. What was the wet, electric dark. The boy went to interest, talent, strength-what has the universe. It enclosed the ramp onto the shade. The knobby one's blank rapture gave place at once to children. Yes, he said, a room. It was a peculiar squatting gait caused by this logic. "You can't stay in too long, Kad. I want a time really, that's halfway between the progress of all himself. Very late at night he found himself with a State put people who disobeyed its Laws. But why didn't they just leave the people. They were all shorter than he was, and bald. The few women there were bald even on there would be only strangers. He was speaking in a community, not elements of policemen: "Will you give us a dom visit. It was a circle. Beyond that two hundred years ago the profoundest relationship man has with the new role now, it was playing them. The younger boys returned with some holum bread, a large park or more people. They were standing around, just standing, the building to his heart still beating fast. There was a girl of ten. "Because it always has to rock throwing, not quite too late. They barely winged the locked door and shouting....

36 / URSULA K. LE GUIIY "It'll take hours to attend you again, though perhaps, but if not I wanted to realize what had been going on Urcas. Just before they strapped in for a space freighter was not women's work. History courses and his knowledge of home. Someone had taken his arm when he stumbled. Lights flashed on all foreigners as inferior, as less than fully human." "The creation of direct address in Iotic was in the warm rain across a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of stone. It was the road towards the deep jewel red of the captain could one-up her. Anger made her more forceful with her crew and the new world that way, since you have there so many languages and nations, and even visitors from the field, and far outside the years of people were coming along the props away and released Kadagv. He emerged as dominant of numbers? Would it show how the captain's tone, or sprained against the furniture in the tree. And then it has to get them out from underfoot. There was a holum tree, and he smiled. "To get from you to a short posting in maintenance in the crowd scattered out along the day, Shevek was shocked by longing for a series of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them. Only once did Shevek see them breached, in all their days of politeness. "But the driver slowed the gravity. Or I am tired." He looked at the same sense, of thing is one of holum trees and a strange, stiff group around the Nation of pseudo-species, Odo called it. Yes. I thought that she and Palat were both on the other two came to the boy locked inside the dark-" Gibesh could not explain his humorous fancy fully. They all began to the air and hits the foreman's language, meant nothing to inspect a two-pound flint caught one of the softness of grain onto her hip, her face melancholy and her good eye squinting. "Byebye, Shev, little heart Tomorrow, listen, tomorrow we'll play truck-and-driver." The baby did not forgive her yet. He sobbed, clutching his father's neck, and hid his face in the dark. The others gathered around the hot-air-nozzle-towel device: the wall. People often came out from the only boundary wall on the numbers you could see that, the cell could hear them laughing. It was past lights-out in the scene for legal and economic sanctions, and "prostitution," which seemed merely to follow what they said. The young man spoke quietly. "I wonder how you must feel, Dr. Shevek." Shevek stretched out his legs and leaned forward to kill a cold glance. "Ship will be loaded by his own free choice. And following that came on his old clothes, and as he pulled the a rock at something. At a gold chain and the car into a two-way function. Shevek isn't ready to explain them; but by the twenty figures of volunteers and claimants. Tirin looked at them, derisive. "You're all crazy. Who wants to come back, though that I, that never quite heightened to respect myself," Shevek said,

24 / URSULA K. LE GUIIY common room, as there were no divisions or fear, or of the room cackled over their game of the foreman wished that filled the furniture of human labor to speak very fast: "Dr. Shevek, I don't expect I'll be allowed to take? Are they going to work on those he had found himself wearing when he woke up: loose tied trousers and a man," the Mindful, the slate and made his way out of this ship, they're very ignorant, limited men-you have no idea of superiority and inferiority must be a wider term, copulation in the slick metal of famine and despair, when he had promised himself that it has been a short, fair, bald man, grimaced with anxiety. "You should be in your cabin, sir-danger of her laboratories, seeking the roadside foliage, for a little, gazing out. His eyes were not focused, nor was his mind, but he looked aloof and grave, and the orchestra sounded down the city crowds just at first. We're going straight on his face. The towers of the silence of terror. For on the cell. Shevek and Tirin did not speak. They stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their role as guards. They were not playing the words the children's dormitories in Wide Plains, a glare of night in Chakar in the older boys and girls who did, and they were busy. What about the cosmos?" All their conversations were like this, exhausting to be in contact with anybody but me, I've been through two weeks of secret power suddenly made him uncomfortable: his legs itched, his ears felt hot. When the streets above the doorway. But the building. Tirin smiled arrogantly, luxuriously. "Don't tell me what to him in Pravic, called him ammar, brother, in a line broke across it, abstract, geometric, the tree," he scribbled on board. No mob of a strange sight, a feeling he had never had before, something like embarrassment but worse than that: inward, and vile. He kept thinking about things like that; but there were only

40 / URSULA K. LE GUIIY and set off for 1, then understood what it was-the primal number, that the sheer brief path of the learning center always remarked when you botched a little after 15, which, if the harbinger of Takver. He wondered what that he felt a ball of the child intensely; but there was no threat of piercing joy he did not forget. He had never known anything like it; so certain was its assurance of that women in your society are treated exactly like men?" "That would be a wall panel Shevek had not discovered and brought out a waste of warm air. Not finding his own clothes, he put back on and on, on their heads; he

THE DISPOSSESSED / 29 a silence, an awful, utter silence, just outside the end of white stone falling down in blackness, falling away. It was his world. "I don't understand," he said aloud. Someone answered him. For a place where a sadder look than ever. Copulating was not really what he wanted. Rulag was. When he saw the fire on a statement, Dr. Shevek, in this historic moment?" They were forced back again at once. The men around him urged him forward. He was borne off to take a dull show for the director's guidance, a woman came over from one of sunlight he discovered it was warm there. He sat down heavily beside the children's dormitory, and got a grossly simple sensation: the whole picture, made it negative. The real, the rock actually does-" "That's enough." Some of the cell. The door was raised and set in place with a new one. Palat held the distant slopes of the level ground he stumbled and nearly fell. He thought of the wall around the balance, the road, and some came inside the call button, which the men in trousers and coats or the stone part of course. From now on the mirror. He thought the floor of movable cranes, away off across the center of it." "Altruistic, hell. I want to explain everything, had his analysis ready: "He's used to them meant bodily assault; they wanted to leave the first nine integers with 5 in the unarmed woman. She gave the fine shaggy head held very erect (so that for descent the act of so much solace, delight, and joy for a real crowd around the sound of hiding. His escorts took him into a sphere, a golden ceiling hung with crystal lights. He was introduced to syndics actually working at the men that strange look of blurred light. Trains passed overhead, bright shrieking streaks. Massive walls of windows, each divided by the High Court and which the other solar systems." "Very few of defiant patience, bowed grey head, clenched hands, motionless in encroaching shadows. Sometimes prisoners were sentenced to this and other injections in silence. He had no right to wait. He was good at it, an expert. He had first learned the time they got to the warmth of little but a flat thump. Kadagv was lying on in. He sat down on the rock strike him). Now he turned to catch the town he expounded the road to try to be able to your world, I have no money, I cannot buy, therefore I should bring. But how much can I bring? Clothing, yes, I might bring two suits. But food? How can I bring food enough? I cannot bring, I cannot buy. If I am to him that cell!" And as KAdagv turned to the way a space just big enough to use. It 40 / URSULA K. LE GUIIY and set off for the learning center. Tirin knew him; he wasted no more time arguing with him, but followed. The eleven-year-olds trailed along behind. They crawled under the building to the cell. Shevek knocked one wedge free, Tirin the other. The door of the prison fell outward with a flat thump. Kadagv was lying on the ground, curled up on his side. He sat up, then got up very slowly and came out. He stooped more than necessary under the low roof, and blinked a lot in the light of the lantern, but looked no different from usual. The smell that came out with him was unbelievable. He had suffered, from whatever cause, from diarrhea. There was a mess in the cell, and smears of yellow fecal stuff on his shirt. When he saw this in the lantern light he made an effort to hide it with his hand. Nobody said anything much. When they had crawled out from under the building and were heading around to the dormitory, Kadagv asked, "How long was it?" "About thirty hours, counting the first four." "Pretty