away from Siuwensin; which, I gathered as we walked, had been raided by a foray from Passerer across the bridge.
They had struck, set fire, withdrawn; there had been no fight. But all at once lights glared down the dark at us, and scuttling to the roadside we watched a land-caravan, twenty trucks, come at top speed out of the west towards Siuwensin and pass us with a flash of light and a hiss of wheels twenty times repeated; then silence and the dark again.
We soon came to a communal farm-centre, where we were halted and interrogated. I tried to attach myself to the group I had followed down the road, but no luck, no luck for them either, if they did not have their identification-papers with them. They, and I as a foreigner without passport, were cut out of the herd and given separate quarters for the night in a storage-barn, a vast stone semi-cellar with one door locked on us from outside, and no window. Now and then the door was unlocked and a new refugee thrust in by a farm-policeman armed with the Gethenian sonic ‘gun’. The door shut, it was perfectly dark: no light. One’s eyes, cheated of sight, sent star-bursts and fiery blots whirling through the black. The air was cold, and heavy with the dust and odour of grain. No one had a handlight; there were people who had been routed out of their beds, like me; a couple of them were literally naked, and had been given blankets by others on the way. They had nothing. If they had had anything, it would have been their papers. Better to be naked than to lack papers, in Orgoreyn.
They sat dispersed in that hollow, huge, dusty blindness. Sometimes two conversed a while, low-voiced. There was no fellow feeling of being prisoners together. There was no complaint.
I heard one whisper to my left: ‘I saw him in the street, outside my door. His head was blown off.’
‘They use those guns that fire pieces of metal. Foray guns.’
‘Tiena said they weren’t from Passerer, but from Ovord Domain, come down by truck.’
‘But there isn’t any quarrel between Ovord and Siuwensin …’
They did not understand; they did not complain. They did not protest being locked up in a cellar by their fellow-citizens after having been shot and burned out of their homes. They sought no reasons for what had happened to them. 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. People slept. A baby fretted a while, away off in the dark, crying at the echo of its own cries.
The door squealed open and it was broad day, sunlight like a knife in the eyes, bright and frightening. I stumbled out behind the rest and was mechanically following them when I heard my name. I had not recognized it; for one thing the Orgota could say l. Someone had been calling it at intervals ever since the door was unlocked.
‘Please come this way, Mr. Ai,’ said a hurried person in red, and I was no longer a refugee. I was set apart from those nameless ones with whom I had fled down a dark road and whose lack of identity I had shared all night in a dark room. I was named, known, recognized; I existed. It was an intense relief. I followed my leader gladly.
The office of the Local Commensal Farm Centrality was hectic and upset, but they made time to look after me, and apologized to me for the discomforts of the night past. ‘If only you had not chosen to enter the Commensality of Siuwensin!’ lamented one fat Inspector, ‘if only you had taken the customary roads!’ They did not know who I was or why I was to be given particular treatment; their ignorance was evident, but made no difference. Genly Ai, the Envoy, was to be treated as a distinguished person. He was. By mid-afternoon I was on my way to Mishnory in a car put at my disposal by the Commensal Farm Centrality of East Homsvashom, District Eight. I had a new passport, and a free pass to all Transient-Houses on my road, and a telegraphed invitation to the Mishnory residence of the First Commensal District Commissioner of Entry-Roads and Ports, Mr. Uth Shusgis.
The radio of the little car came on with the engine and ran while the car did; so all afternoon as I