The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,108
where Estraven could go with his unacceptable identification papers and be assured at least of a night’s lodging in the Commensal jail or perhaps on the nearest Commensal Voluntary Farm. All at once – there, at that last moment, no sooner – I realized what my selfishness and Estraven’s silence had kept from me, where he was going and what he was getting into. I said, ‘Therem – wait—’
But he was off, downhill: a magnificent fast skier, and this time not holding back for me. He shot away on a long quick curving descent through the shadows over the snow. He ran from me, and straight into the guns of the border-guards. I think they shouted warnings or orders to halt, and a light sprang up somewhere, but I am not sure; in any case he did not stop, but flashed on toward the fence, and they shot him down before he reached it. They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, ‘Arek!’ Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark.
20: A FOOL’S ERRAND
Somewhere in the notes Estraven wrote during our trek across the Gobrin Ice he wonders why his companion is ashamed to cry. I could have told him even then that it was not shame so much as fear. Now I went on through the Sinoth Valley, through the evening of his death, into the cold country that lies beyond fear. There I found you can weep all you like, but there’s no good in it.
I was taken back to Sassinoth and imprisoned, because I had been in the company of an outlaw, and probably because they did not know what else to do with me. From the start, even before official orders came from Erhenrang, they treated me well. My Karhidish jail was a furnished room in the Tower of the Lords-Elect in Sassinoth; I had a fireplace, a radio, and five large meals daily. It was not comfortable. The bed was hard, the covers thin, the floor bare, the air cold – like any room in Karhide. But they sent in a physician, in whose hand and voice was a more enduring, a more profitable comfort than any I ever found in Orgoreyn. After he came, I think the door was left unlocked. I recall it standing open, and myself wishing it were shut, because of the chill draught of air from the hall. But I had not the strength, the courage, to get off my bed and shut my prison door.
The physician, a grave, maternal young fellow, told me with an air of peaceable certainty, ‘You have been underfed and overtaxed for five or six months. You have spent yourself. There’s nothing more to spend. Lie down, rest. Lie down like the rivers frozen in the valleys in winter. Lie still. Wait.’
But when I slept I was always in the truck, huddling together with the others, all of us stinking, shivering, naked, squeezed together for warmth, all but one. One lay by himself against the barred door, the cold one, with a mouth full of clotted blood. He was the traitor. He had gone on by himself, deserting us, deserting me. I would wake up full of rage, a feeble shaky rage that turned into feeble tears.
I must have been rather ill, for I remember some of the effects of high fever, and the physician stayed with me one night or perhaps more. I can’t recall those nights, but do remember saying to him, and hearing the querulous keening note in my own voice, ‘He could have stopped. He saw the guards. He ran right into the guns.’
The young physician said nothing for a while. ‘You’re not saying that he killed himself?’