The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,45

and down as if trying to start a spark in my engine, and bellowed a greeting to the Ambassador of the Ekumen of the Known Worlds to Gethen.

That was a surprise, for not one of the twelve or fourteen Inspectors who had studied my papers had shown any sign of recognizing my name or the terms Envoy or Ekumen – all of which had been at least vaguely familiar to all Karhiders I had met. I had decided that Karhide had never let any broadcasts concerning me be used on Orgota stations, but had tried to keep me a national secret.

‘Not Ambassador, Mr. Shusgis. Only an envoy’.

‘Future Ambassador, then. Yes, by Meshe!’ Shusgis, a solid, beaming man, looked me up and down and laughed again. ‘You’re not what I expected, Mr. Ai! Nowhere near it. Tall as a street-lamp, they said, thin as a sledge-runner, soot-black and slant-eyed – an ice-ogre I expected, a monster! Nothing of the kind. Only you’re darker than most of us.’

‘Earth-coloured,’ I said.

‘And you were in Siuwensin the night of the foray? By the breast of Meshe! what a world we live in. You might have been killed crossing the bridge over the Ey, after crossing all space to get here. Well! Well! You’re here. And a lot of people want to see you, and hear you, and make you welcome to Orgoreyn at last.’

He installed me at once, no arguments, in an apartment of his house. A high official and wealthy man, he lived in a style that has no equivalent in Karhide, even among lords of great Domains. Shusgis’ house was a whole island, housing over a hundred employees, domestic servants, clerks, technical advisers, and so on, but no relatives, no kinfolk. The system of extended-family clans, of Hearths and Domains, though still vaguely discernible in the Commensal structure, was ‘nationalized’ several hundred years ago in Orgoreyn. No child over a year old lives with its parent or parents; all are brought up in the Commensal Hearths. There is no rank by descent. Private wills are not legal: a man dying leaves his fortune to the state. All start equal. But obviously they don’t go on so. Shusgis was rich, and liberal with his riches. There were luxuries in my rooms that I had not known existed on Winter – for instance, a shower. There was an electric heater as well as a well-stocked fireplace. Shusgis laughed: ‘They told me, keep the Envoy warm, he’s from a hot world, an oven of a world, and can’t stand our cold. Treat him as if he were pregnant, put furs on his bed and heaters in his room, heat his wash-water and keep his windows shut! Will it do? Will you be comfortable? Please tell me what else you’d like to have here.’

Comfortable! Nobody in Karhide had ever asked me, under any circumstances, if I was comfortable.

‘Mr. Shusgis,’ I said with emotion, ‘I feel perfectly at home.’

He wasn’t satisfied till he had got another pesthry-fur blanket on the bed, and more logs into the fireplace. ‘I know how it is,’ he said, ‘when I was pregnant I couldn’t keep warm – my feet were like ice, I sat over the fire all that winter. Long ago of course, but I remember!’ – Gethenians tend to have their children young; most of them, after the age of twenty-four or so, use contraceptives, and they cease to be fertile in the female phase at about forty. Shusgis was in his fifties, therefore his ‘long ago of course’, and it certainly was difficult to imagine him as a young mother. He was a hard shrewd jovial politician, whose acts of kindness served his interest and whose interest was himself. His type is panhuman. I had met him on Earth, and on Hain, and on Ollul. I expect to meet him in Hell.

‘You’re well informed as to my looks and tastes, Mr. Shusgis. I’m flattered; I thought my reputation hadn’t preceded me.’

‘No,’ he said, understanding me perfectly, ‘they’d just as soon have kept you buried under a snowdrift, there in Erhenrang, eh? But they let you go, they let you go; and that’s when we realized, here, that you weren’t just another Karhidish lunatic but the real thing.’

‘I don’t follow you, I think.’

‘Why, Argaven and his crew were afraid of you, Mr. Ai – afraid of you and glad to see your back. Afraid if they mishandled you, or silenced you, there might be retribution. A foray from outer