The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,72

stole it. It had no lethal setting; perhaps none of the guards’ guns did. They do not kill people on their Farms: they let hunger and winter and despair do their murders for them.

There were thirty or forty jailkeepers and a hundred and fifty or sixty prisoners, none of them very well off, most of them sound asleep though it was not much past Fourth Hour. I got a young guard to take me around and show me the prisoners asleep. I saw them in the staring light of the great room they slept in, and all but gave up my hope of acting that first night before I had drawn suspicion on myself. They were all hidden away on the longbeds in their bags like babies in wombs, invisible, indistinguishable. – All but one, there, too long to hide, a dark face like a skull, eyes shut and sunken, a mat of long, fibrous hair.

The luck that had turned in Ethwen now turned the world with it under my hand. I never had a gift but one, to know when the great wheel gives to a touch, to know and act. I had thought that foresight lost, last year in Erhenrang, and never to be regained. A great delight it was to feel that certainty again, to know that I could steer my fortune and the world’s chance like a bob-sled down the steep, dangerous hour.

Since I still went roaming and prying about, in my part as a restless curious dimwitted fellow, they wrote me on to the late watch-shift; by midnight all but I and one other late watcher within doors slept. I kept up my shiftless poking about the place, wandering up and down from time to time by the longbeds. I settled my plans, and began to ready my will and body to enter dothe, for my own strength would never suffice unaided by the strength out of the Dark. A while before dawn I went into the sleeping-room once more and with the cook’s gun gave Genly Ai a hundredth-second of stun to the brain, then hoisted him up bag and all and carried him out over my shoulder to the guardroom. ‘What’s doing?’ says the other guard half asleep, ‘let him be!’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Another one dead? By Meshe’s guts, and not hardly winter yet.’ He turned his head sideways to look into the Envoy’s face as it hung down on my back. ‘That one, the Pervert, is it. By the Eye, I didn’t believe all they say about Karhiders, till I took a look at him, the ugly freak he is. He spent all week on the longbed moaning and sighing, but I didn’t think he’d die right off like that. Well, go dump him outside where he’ll keep till daylight, don’t stand there like a carry-loader with a sack of turds …’

I stopped by the Inspection Office on my way down the corridor, and I being the guard none stopped me from entering and looking till I found the wall-panel that contained the alarms and switches. None was labelled, but guards had scratched letters beside the switches to jog their memory when haste was needed; taking F.f. for ‘fences’ I turned that switch to cut the current to the outermost defences of the Farm, and then went on, pulling Ai along now by the shoulders. I came by the guard on duty in the watchroom by the door. I made a show of labouring to haul the dead load, for the dothe-strength was full within me and I did not want it seen how easily, in fact, I could pull or carry the weight of a man heavier than myself. I said, ‘A dead prisoner, they said get him out of the sleeping-room. Where do I stow him?’

‘I don’t know. Get him outside. Under a roof, so he won’t get snow-buried and float up stinking next spring in the thaws. It’s snowing peditia.’ He meant what we call sove-snow, a thick, wet fall, the best of news to me. ‘All right, all right,’ I said, and lugged my load outside and around the corner of the barracks, out of his sight. I got Ai up over my shoulders again, went northeast a few hundred yards, clambered up over the dead fence and slung my burden down, jumped down free, took up Ai once more and made off as fast as I could towards the river. I was not far from the fence when a