space, eh! So they didn’t dare touch you. And they tried to hush you up. Because they’re afraid of you and of what you bring to Gethen!’
It was exaggerated; I certainly hadn’t been censored out of the Karhidish news, at least so long as Estraven was in power. But I already had the impression that for some reason news hadn’t got around about me much in Orgoreyn, and Shusgis confirmed my suspicions.
‘Then you aren’t afraid of what I bring to Gethen?’
‘No, we’re not, sir!’
‘Sometimes I am.’
He chose to laugh jovially at that. I did not qualify my words. I’m not a salesman, I’m not selling Progress to the Abos. We have to meet as equals, with some mutual understanding and candour, before my mission can even begin.
‘Mr. Ai, there are a lot of people waiting to meet you, bigwigs and little ones, and some of them are the ones you’ll be wanting to talk to here, the people who get things done. I asked for the honour of receiving you because I’ve got a big house and because I’m well known as a neutral sort of fellow, not a Dominator and not an Open-Trader, just a plain Commissioner who does his job and won’t lay you open to any talk about whose house you’re staying in.’ He laughed. ‘But that means you’ll be eating out a good deal, if you don’t mind.’
‘I’m at your disposal, Mr. Shusgis.’
‘Then tonight it’ll be a little supper with Vanake Slose.’
‘Commensal from Kuwera – Third District, is it?’ Of course I had done some homework before I came. He fussed over my condescension in deigning to learn anything about his country. Manners here were certainly different from manners in Karhide; there, the fuss he was making would either have degraded his own shifgrethor or insulted mine; I wasn’t sure which, but it would have done one or the other – practically everything did.
I needed clothes fit for a dinner-party, having lost my good Erhenrang suit in the raid on Siuwensin, so that afternoon I took a Government taxi downtown and bought myself an Orgota rig. Hieb and shirt were much as in Karhide, but instead of summer breeches they wore thigh-high leggings the year round, baggy and cumbrous; the colours were loud blues or reds, and the cloth and cut and make were all a little shoddy. It was standardized work. The clothes showed me what it was that this impressive, massive city lacked: elegance. Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it. I went back to Shusgis’ house and revelled in the hot showerbath, which came at one from all sides in a kind of prickly mist. I thought of the cold tin tubs of East Karhide that I had chattered and shuddered in last summer, the ice-ringed basin in my Erhenrang room. Was that elegance? Long live comfort! I put on my gaudy red finery, and was driven with Shusgis to the supper-party in his chauffeured private car. There are more servants, more services in Orgoreyn than in Karhide. This is because all Orgota are employees of the state; the state must find employment for all citizens, and does so. This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point.
Commensal Slose’s fiercely-lighted, high, white reception room held twenty or thirty guests, three of them Commensals and all of them evidently notables of one kind or another. This was more than a group of Orgota curious to see ‘the alien’. I was not a curiosity, as I had been for a whole year in Karhide; not a freak; not a puzzle. I was, it seemed, a key.
What door was I to unlock? Some of them had a notion, these statesmen and officials who greeted me effusively, but I had none.
I wouldn’t find out during supper. All over Winter, even in frozen barbarian Perunter, it is considered execrably vulgar to talk business while eating. As supper was served promptly I postponed my questions and attended to a gummy fish soup and to my host and fellow guests. Slose was a frail, youngish person, with unusually light, bright eyes and a muted, intense voice; he looked like an idealist, a dedicated soul. I liked his manner, but I wondered what it was he was dedicated to. On my left sat another Commensal, a fat-faced fellow named Obsle. He was gross, genial, and inquisitive. By the third