The Left Hand of Darkness

From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of Ansible Document 01-01101-934-2-Gethin. To the Stabile an Olul. Report from Genley I. First Mobile on Gethin slash Winter. Hainish Cycle 93. Ecumenical Year 1490-97. I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my home world that truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling, like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive. The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed, I'm not sure whose story it is. You can judge better. But it is all one. And if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then, you can choose the fact you like best. Yet none of them is false. And it is all one story. It starts on the forty-fourth diurnal of the year 1491, which, on the planet winter, in the nation Karhide was O'Darrahad Tuah, or the twenty-second day of the third month of spring in the year one. It is always the year one here, only the dating of every past and future year changes each New Year's day as one counts backwards or forwards from the unitary now. So it was spring of the year one, in Ehrenrang, capital city of Karhide, and I was in peril of my life, and did not know it. I was in a parade. I walked just behind the gossywars and just before the king. It was raining. Rain clouds over dark towers, rain falling in deep streets, a dark storm-beaten city of stone, through which one vein of gold winds slowly. Next come merchants, potentates and artisans of the city Ehrenrang, rank after rank, magnificently clothed, advancing through the rain as comfortably as fish through the sea. Their faces are keen and calm. They do not march in step. This is a parade with no soldiers, not even imitation soldiers. Next come the lords and mayors and representatives, one person or five or forty-five or four hundred, from each domain and co-domain of Karhide, a vast ornate procession that moves to the music of metal horns and hollow blocks of bone and wood, and the dry, pure lilting of electric flutes. The various banners of the great domains tangle in a rain-beaten confusion of colour with the yellow pennants that bedeck the way, and the various musics of each group clash and interweave in many rhythms echoing in the deep stone street. Next a troupe of jugglers with polished spheres of gold, which they hurl up high in flashing flights and catch and hurl again, making fountain jets of bright jugglery. All at once, as if they had literally caught the light, the gold spheres blaze bright as glass. The sun is breaking through. Next forty men in yellow playing gaseors. The gaseor, played only in the king's presence, produces a preposterous, disconsolate bellow. Forty of them play together, shake one's reason, shake the towers of Ehrenrang, shake down a last spatter of rain from the windy clouds. If this is the royal music, no wonder the kings of Karhide are all mad. Next the royal party, guards and functionaries and dignitaries of the city and the court, deputies, senators, chancellors, ambassadors, lords of the kingdom, none of them keeping step or rank yet walking with great dignity. And among them is King Argavin XV, in white tunic and shirt and breeches, with leggings of saffron leather and a peaked yellow cap. A gold finger ring is his only adornment and sign of office. Behind this group eight sturdy fellows bear the royal litter, rough with yellow sapphires in which no king has ridden for centuries, a ceremonial relic of the very long ago. By the litter walk eight guards armed with foray guns, also relics of a more barbaric past, but not empty ones, being loaded with pellets of soft iron. Death walks behind the king.