The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,16

there any communication you’d care to make with the Stabiles on Hain, sir?’

‘I don’t speak Voidish,’ said the king with his dull, malign grin.

‘They’ll have an aide standing ready – I alerted them – who can handle Karhidish.’

‘What d’you mean? How?’

‘Well, as you know, sir, I’m not the first alien to come to Gethen. I was preceded by a team of Investigators, who didn’t announce their presence, but passed as well as they could for Gethenians, and travelled about in Karhide and Orgoreyn and the Archipelago for a year. They left, and reported to the Councils of the Ekumen, over forty years ago, during your grandfather’s reign. Their report was extremely favourable. And so I studied the information they’d gathered, and the languages they’d recorded, and came. Would you like to see the device working, sir?’

‘I don’t like tricks, Mr. Ai.’

‘It’s not a trick, sir. Some of your own scientists have examined—’

‘I’m not a scientist.’

‘You’re a sovereign, my lord. Your peers on the Prime World of the Ekumen wait for a word from you.’

He looked at me savagely. In trying to flatter and interest him I had cornered him in a prestige-trap. It was all going wrong.

‘Very well. Ask your machine there what makes a man a traitor.’

I typed out slowly on the keys, which were set to Karhidish characters, ‘King Argaven of Karhide asks the Stabiles on Hain what makes a man a traitor.’ The letters burned across the small screen and faded. Argaven watched, his restless shifting stilled for a minute.

There was a pause, a long pause. Somebody seventy-two light-years away was no doubt feverishly punching demands on the language computer for Karhidish, if not on a philosophy-storage computer. At last the bright letters burned up out of the screen, hung a while, and faded slowly away: ‘To King Argaven of Karhide on Gethen, greetings. I do not know what makes a man a traitor. No man considers himself a traitor: this makes it hard to find out. Respectfully, Spimolle G. F., for the Stabiles, in Saire on Hain, 93/1491/45.’

When the tape was recorded I pulled it out and gave it to Argaven. He dropped it on the table, walked again to the central fireplace, almost into it, and kicked the flaming logs and beat down the sparks with his hands. ‘As useful an answer as I might get from any Foreteller. Answers aren’t enough. Mr. Ai. Nor is your box, your machine there. Nor your vehicle, your ship. A bag of tricks and a trickster. You want me to believe you, your tales and messages. But why need I believe, or listen? If there are eighty thousand worlds full of monsters out there among the stars, what of it? We want nothing from them. We’ve chosen our way of life and have followed it for a long time. Karhide’s on the brink of a new epoch, a great new age. We’ll go our own way.’ He hesitated as if he had lost the thread of his argument – not his own argument, perhaps, in the first place. If Estraven was no longer the King’s Ear, somebody else was. ‘And if there were anything these Ekumens wanted from us, they wouldn’t have sent you alone. It’s a joke, a hoax. Aliens would be here by the thousand.’

‘But it doesn’t take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.’

‘It might to keep it open.’

‘The Ekumen will wait till you open it, sir. It will force nothing on you. I was sent alone, and remain here alone, in order to make it impossible for you to fear me.’

‘Fear you?’ said the king, turning his shadow-scarred face, grinning, speaking loud and high. ‘But I do fear you, Envoy. I fear those who sent you. I fear liars, and I fear tricksters, and worst I fear the bitter truth. And so I rule my country well. Because only fear rules men. Nothing else works. Nothing else lasts long enough. You are what you say you are, yet you’re a joke, a hoax. There’s nothing in between the stars but void and terror and darkness, and you come out of all that alone trying to frighten me. But I am already afraid, and I am the king. Fear is king! Now take your traps and tricks and go, there’s no more needs saying. I have ordered that you be given the freedom of Karhide.’

So I departed from the royal presence – eck, eck, eck all down the long red floor in the