WINTER’S KING

By

Ursula K. Le Guin

When I wrote this story, a year before I began the novel The Left Hand of Darkness, I did not know that the inhabitants of the planet Winter or Gethen were androgynes. By the time the story came out in print, I did, but too late to emend such usages as “son,”“mother,” and so on.

Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by The Left Hand of Darkness because the androgynes in it are called “he” throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it’s a trap, with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of them more specific, more unjust, as it were, than the use of “he.” And I find made-up pronouns, “te” and “heshe” and so on, dreary and annoying.

In revising the story for this edition, I saw a chance to redress that injustice slightly. In this version, I use the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians—while preserving certain masculine titles such as King and Lord, just to remind one of the ambiguity. This may drive some nonfeminists mad, but that’s only fair.

The androgyny of the characters has little to do with the events of this story, but the pronoun change does make it clear that the central, paradoxical relationship of parent and child is not, as it may have seemed in the other version, a kind of reverse Oedipus twist, but something less -familiar and more ambiguous. Evidently my unconscious mind knew about the Gethenians long before it saw fit to inform me. It’s always doing things like that.

When whirlpools appear in the onward run of time and history seems to swirl around a snag, as in the curious matter of the Succession of Karhide, then pictures come in handy: snapshots, which may be taken up and matched to compare the parent to the child, the young king to the old, and which may also be rearranged and shuffled till the years run straight. For despite the tricks played by instantaneous interstellar communication and just-sub-lightspeed interstellar travel, time (as the Plenipotentiary Axt remarked) does not reverse itself; nor is death mocked.

Thus, although the best-known picture is that dark image of a young king standing above an old king who lies dead in a corridor lit only by mirror-reflections of a burning city, set it aside a while. Look first at the young king, a nation’s pride, as bright and fortunate a soul as ever lived to the age of twenty-two; but when this picture was taken the young king had her back against a wall. She was filthy, she was trembling, and her face was blank and mad, for she had lost that minimal confidence in the world which is called sanity. Inside her head she repeated, as she had been repeating for hours or years, over and over, “I will abdicate. I will abdicate. I will abdicate.” Inside her eyes she saw the red-walled rooms of the Palace, the towers and streets of Erhenrang in falling snow, the lovely plains of the West Fall, the white summits of the Kargav, and she renounced them all, her kingdom. “I will abdicate,” she said not aloud and then, aloud, screamed as once again the person dressed in red and white approached her saying, “Majesty! A plot against your life has been discovered in the Artisan School,” and the humming noise began, softly. She hid her head in her arms and whispered, “Stop it, please stop it,” but the humming whine grew higher and louder and nearer, relentless, until it was so high and loud that it entered her flesh, tore the nerves from their channels and made her bones dance and jangle, hopping to its tune. She hopped and twitched, bare bones strung on thin white threads, and wept dry tears, and shouted, “Have them— Have them— They must— Executed— Stopped— Stop!”

It stopped.

She fell in a clattering, chattering heap to the floor. What floor? Not red tiles, not parquetry, not urine-stained cement, but the wood floor of the room in the tower, the little tower bedroom where she was safe, safe from her ogre parent, the cold, mad, uncaring king, safe to play cat’s cradle with Piry and to sit by the fireside on Borhub’s warm lap, as warm and deep as sleep. But there was no hiding, no safety, no sleep. The person dressed in black had come even here and had hold of her head, lifted it up, lifted on thin white strings the eyelids she tried to close.

“Who am I?”

The blank, black mask stared down. The young king struggled, sobbing, because now the suffocation would begin: she would not be able to breathe until she said the name, the right name— “Gerer!”—She could breathe. She was allowed to breathe. She had recognized the black one in time.

“Who am I?” said a different voice, gently, and the young king groped for that strong presence that always brought her sleep, truce, solace. “Rebade,” she whispered, “tell me what to do…”

“Sleep.”

She obeyed. A deep sleep, and dreamless, for it was real. Dreams came at waking, now. Unreal, the horrible dry red light of sunset burned her eyes open and she stood, once more, on the Palace balcony looking down at fifty thousand black pits opening and shutting. From the pits came a paroxysmic gush of sound, a shrill, rhythmic eructation: her name. Her name was roared in her ears as a taunt, a jeer. She beat her hands on the narrow brass railing and shouted at them, “I will silence you!” She could not hear her voice, only their voice, the pestilent mouths of the mob that hated her, screaming her name. “Come away, my king,” said the one gentle voice, and Rebade drew her away from the balcony into the vast, red-walled quiet of the Hall of Audience. The screaming ceased with a click. Rebade’s expression was as always composed, compassionate. “What will you do now?” she said in her gentle voice.

“I will— I will abdicate—”

“No,” Rebade said calmly. “That is not right. What will you do now?”

The young king stood silent, shaking. Rebade helped her sit down on the iron cot, for the walls had darkened as they often did and drawn in all about her to a little cell. “You will call…”

“Call up the Erhenrang Guard. Have them shoot into the crowd. Shoot to kill. They must be taught a lesson.” The young king spoke rapidly and distinctly in a loud, high voice. Rebade said, “Very good, my lord, a wise decision! Right. We shall come out all right. You are doing right. Trust me.”

“I do. I trust you. Get me out of here,” the young king whispered, seizing Rebade’s arm: but her friend frowned. That was not right. She had driven Rebade and hope away again. Rebade was leaving now, calm and regretful, though the young king begged her to stop, to come back, for the noise was softly beginning again, the whining hum that tore the mind to pieces, and already the person in red and white was approaching across a red, interminable floor. “Majesty! A plot against your life has been discovered in the Artisan School—”

Down Old Harbor Street to the water’s edge the street lamps burned cavernously bright. Guard Pepenerer on her rounds glanced down that slanting vault of light expecting nothing, and saw something staggering up it towards her. Pepenerer did not believe in porngropes, but she saw a porngrope, sea-beslimed, staggering on thin webbed feet, gasping dry air, whimpering….Old sailors’ tales slid out of Pepenerer’s mind and she saw a drunk or a maniac or a victim staggering between the dank grey warehouse walls. “Now then! Hold on there!” she bellowed, on the run. The drunk, half naked and wild-eyed, let out a yell of terror and tried to dodge away, slipped on the frost-slick stones of the street and pitched down sprawling. Pepenerer got out her gun and delivered a half-second of stun, just to keep the drunk quiet; then squatted down by her, wound up her radio and called the West Ward for a car.

Both the arms, sprawled out limp and meek on the cold cobbles, were blotched with injection marks. Not drunk; drugged. Pepenerer sniffed, but got no resinous scent of orgrevy. She had been drugged, then; thieves, or a ritual clan-revenge. Thieves would not have left the gold ring on the forefinger, a massive thing, carved, almost as wide as the fingerjoint. Pepenerer crouched forward to look at it. Then she turned her head and looked at the beaten, blank face in profile against the paving-stones, hard lit by the glare of the street lamps. She took a new quarter-crown piece out of her pouch and looked at the left profile stamped on the bright tin, then back at the right profile stamped in light and shadow and cold stone. Then, hearing the purr of the electric car turning down from the Long-way into Old Harbor Street, she stuck the coin back in her pouch, muttering to herself, “Damn fool.”

King Argaven was off hunting in the mountains, anyhow, and had been for a couple of weeks; it had been in all the bulletins.

“You see,” said Hoge the physician, “we can assume that she was mindformed; but that gives us almost nothing to go on. There are too many expert mindformers in Karhide, and in Orgoreyn for that matter. Not criminals whom the police might have a lead on, but respectable mentalists or physicians. To whom the drugs are legally available. As for getting anything from her, if they had any skill at all they will have blocked everything they did to rational access. All clues will be buried, the trigger-suggestions hidden, and we simply cannot guess what questions to ask. There is no way, short of brain-destruction, of going through everything in her mind; and even under hypnosis and deep drugging there would be no way now to distinguish implanted ideas or emotions from her own autonomous ones. Perhaps the Aliens could do something, though I doubt their mindscience is all they boast of; at any rate it’s out of reach. We have only one real hope.“

“Which is?” Lord Gerer asked, stolidly.

“The king is quick and resolute. At the beginning, before they broke her, she may have known what they were doing to her, and so set up some block or resistance, left herself some escape route…”

Hoge’s low voice lost confidence as she spoke, and trailed off in the silence of the high, red, dusky room. She drew no response from old Gerer who stood, black-clad, before the fire.

The temperature of that room in the King’s Palace of Erhenrang was 12° C where Lord Gerer stood, and 5° midway between the two big fireplaces; outside it was snowing lightly, a mild day only a few degrees below freezing. Spring had come to Winter. The fires at either end of the room roared red and gold, devouring thigh-thick logs. Magnificence, a harsh luxury, a quick splendor; fireplaces, fireworks, lightning, meteors, volcanoes; such things satisfied the people of Karhide on the world called Winter. But, except in Arctic colonies above the 35th parallel, they had never installed central heating in any building in the many centuries of their Age of Technology. Comfort was allowed to come to them rare, welcome, unsought: a gift, like joy.

The king’s personal servant, sitting by the bed, turned towards the physician and the Lord Councilor, though she did not speak.

Both at once crossed the room. The broad, hard bed, high on gilt pillars, heavy with a finery of red cloaks and coverlets, bore up the king’s body almost level with their eyes. To Gerer it appeared a ship breasting, motionless, a swift vast flood of darkness, carrying the young king into shadows, terrors, years. Then with a terror of her own the old councilor saw that Argaven’s eyes were open, staring out a half-curtained window at the stars.

Gerer feared lunacy; idiocy; she did not know what she feared. Hoge had warned her: “The king will not behave ‘normally,’ Lord Gerer. She has suffered thirteen days of torment, intimidation, exhaustion, and mindhandling. There may be brain damage, there will certainly be side-and after-effects of drugs.” Neither fear nor warning parried the shock. Argaven’s bright, weary eyes turned to Gerer and paused on her blankly a moment; then saw her. And Gerer, though she could not see the black mask reflected, saw the hate, the horror, saw her young king, infinitely beloved, gasping in imbecile terror and struggling with the servant, with Hoge, with her own weakness in the effort to get away, to get away from Gerer.

Standing in the cold midst of the room where the prowlike head of the bedstead hid her from the king, Gerer heard them pacify Argaven and settle her down again. Argaven’s voice sounded reedy, childishly plaintive. So the Old King, Emran, had spoken in her last madness with a child’s voice. Then silence, and the burning of the two great fires.

Korgry, the king’s bodyservant, yawned and rubbed her eyes. Hoge measured something from a vial into a hypodermic. Gerer stood in despair. My child, my king, what have they done to you? So great a trust, so fair a promise, lost, lost… So the one who looked like a lump of half-carved black rock, a heavy, prudent, rude old courtier, grieved and was passion-racked, her love and service of the young king being the world’s one worth to her.

Argaven spoke aloud: “My child—”

Gerer winced, feeling the words torn out of her own mind; but Hoge, untroubled by love, comprehended and said softly to Argaven, “Prince Emran is well, my liege. She is with her attendants at Warrever Castle. We are in constant communication. All is well there.”

Gerer heard the king’s harsh breathing, and came somewhat closer to the bed, though out of sight still behind the high headboard.

“Have I been sick?”

“You are not well yet,” the physician said, bland.

“Where—”

“Your own room, in the Palace, in Erhenrang.”

But Gerer, coming a step closer, though not in view of the king, said, “We do not know where you have been.”

Hoge’s smooth face creased with a frown, though, physician as she was and so in her way ruler of them all, she dared not direct the frown at the Lord Councilor. Gerer’s voice did not seem to trouble the king, who asked another question or two, sane and brief, and then lay quiet. Presently the servant Korgry, who had sat with her ever since she had been brought into the Palace (last night, in secret, by side doors, like a shameful suicide of the last reign, but all in reverse), Korgry committed lese-majeste: huddled forward on her high stool, she let her head droop on the side of the bed, and slept. The guard at the door yielded place to a new guard, in whispers. Officials came and received a fresh bulletin for public release on the state of the king’s health, in whispers. Stricken by symptoms of fever while vacationing in the High Kargav, the king had been rushed to Erhenrang, and was now responding satisfactorily to treatment, etc. Physician Hoge rem ir Hogeremme at the Palace has released the following statement, etc., etc. “May the Wheel turn for our king,” people in village houses said solemnly as they lit the fire on the altarhearth, to which elders sitting near the fire remarked, “It comes of her roving around the city at night and climbing mountains, fool tricks like,” but they kept the radio on to catch the next bulletin. A very great number of people had come and gone and loitered and chatted this day in the square before the Palace, watching those who went in and out, watching the vacant balcony; there were still several hundred down there, standing around patiently in the snow. Argaven XVII was loved in her domain. After the dull brutality of King Emran’s reign that had ended in the shadow of madness and the country’s bankruptcy, she had come: sudden, gallant, young, changing everything; sane and shrewd, yet magnanimous. She had the fire, the splendor that suited her people. She was the force and center of a new age: one born, for once, king of the right kingdom.

“Gerer.”

It was the king’s voice, and Gerer hastened stiffly through the hot and cold of the great room, the firelight and dark.

Argaven was sitting up. Her arms shook and the breath caught in her throat; her eyes burned across the dark air at Gerer. By her left hand, which bore the Sign-Ring of the Harge dynasty, lay the sleeping face of the servant, derelict, serene. “Gerer,” the king said with effort and clarity, “summon the Council. Tell them, I will abdicate.”

So crude, so simple? All the drugs, the terrorizing, the hypnosis, parahypnosis, neurone-stimulation, synapse-pairing, spotshock that Hoge had described, for this blunt result? But reasoning must wait. They must temporize. “My liege, when your strength returns—”

“Now. Call the Council, Gerer!”

Then she broke, like a bowstring breaking, and stammered in a fury of fear that found no sense or strength to flesh itself in; and still her faithful servant slept beside her, deaf.

In the next picture things are going better, it appears. Here is King Argaven XVII in good health and good clothes, finishing a large breakfast. She talks with the nearer dozen of the forty or fifty people sharing or serving the meal (singularity is a king’s prerogative, but seldom privacy), and includes the rest in the largesse of her courtesy. She looks, as everyone has said, quite herself again. Perhaps she is not quite herself again, however; something is missing, a youthful serenity, a confidence, replaced by a similar but less reassuring quality, a kind of heedlessness. Out of it she rises in wit and warmth, but always subsides to it again, that darkness which absorbs her and makes her heedless: fear, pain, resolution?

Mr. Mobile Axt, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Winter from the Ekumen of the Known Worlds, who had spent the last six days on the road trying to drive an electric car faster than 50 kph from Mishnory in Orgoreyn to Erhenrang in Karhide, overslept breakfast, and so arrived in the Audience Hall prompt, but hungry. The old Chief of the Council, the king’s cousin Gerer rem ir Verhen, met the Alien at the door of the great hall and greeted him with the polysyllabic politeness of Karhide. The Plenipotentiary responded as best he could, discerning beneath the eloquence Gerer’s desire to tell him something.

“I am told the king is perfectly recovered,” he said, “and I heartily hope this is true.”

“It is not,” the old Councilor said, her voice suddenly blunt and toneless. “Mr. Axt, I tell you this trusting your confidence; there are not ten others in Karhide who know the truth. She is not recovered. She was not sick.”

Axt nodded. There had of course been rumors.

“She will go alone in the city sometimes, at night, in common clothes, walking, talking with strangers. The pressures of kingship… She is very young.” Gerer paused a moment, struggling with some suppressed emotion. “One night six weeks ago, she did not come back. A message was delivered to me and the Second Lord, at dawn. If we announced her disappearance, she would be killed; if we waited a half-month in silence she would be restored unhurt. We kept silent, lied to the Council, sent out false news. On the thirteenth night she was found wandering in the city. She had been drugged and mindformed. By which enemy or faction we do not yet know. We must work in utter secrecy; we cannot wreck the people’s confidence in her, her own confidence in herself. It is hard: she remembers nothing. But what they did is plain. They broke her will and bent her mind all to one thing. She believes she must abdicate the throne.”

The voice remained low and flat; the eyes betrayed anguish. And the Plenipotentiary turning suddenly saw the reflection of that anguish in the eyes of the young king.

“Holding my audience, cousin?”

Argaven smiled but there was a knife in it. The old Councilor excused herself stolidly, bowed, left, a patient ungainly figure diminishing down a long corridor.

Argaven stretched out both hands to the Plenipotentiary in the greeting of equals, for in Karhide the Ekumen was recognized as a sister kingdom, though not a living soul had seen it. But her words were not the polite discourse that Axt expected. All she said, and fiercely, was, “At last!”

“I left as soon as I received your message. The roads are still icy in East Orgoreyn and the West Fall, I couldn’t make very good time. But I was very glad to come. Glad to leave, too.” Axt smiled saying this, for he and the young king enjoyed each other’s candor. What Argaven’s welcome implied, he waited to see, watching, with some exhilaration, the mobile, beautiful, androgynous face.

“Orgoreyn breeds bigots as a corpse breeds worms, as one of my ancestors remarked. I’m glad you find the air fresher here in Karhide. Come this way. Gerer told you that I was kidnapped, and so forth? Yes. It was all according to the old rules. Kidnapping is a quite formal art. If it had been one of the anti-Alien groups who think your Ekumen intends to enslave the earth, they might have ignored the rules; I think it was one of the old clan-factions hoping to regain power through me, the power they had in the last reign. But we don’t know, yet. It’s strange, to know that one has seen them face to face and yet can’t recognize them; who knows but that I see those faces daily? Well, no profit in such notions. They wiped out all their tracks. I am sure only of one thing. They did not tell me that I must abdicate.“

She and the Plenipotentiary were walking side by side up the long, immensely high room toward the dais and chairs at the far end. The windows were little more than slits, as usual on this cold world; fulvous strips of sunlight fell from them diagonally to the red-paved floor, dusk and dazzle in Axt’s eyes. He looked up at the young king’s face in that somber, shifting radiance. “Who then?”

“I did.”

“When, my lord, and why?”

“When they had me, when they were remaking me to fit their mold and play their game. Why? So that I can’t fit their mold and play their game! Listen, Lord Axt, if they wanted me dead they’d have killed me. They want me alive, to govern, to be king. As such I am to follow the orders imprinted in my brain, gain their ends for them. I am their tool, their machine, waiting for the switch to be thrown. The only way to prevent that, is to… discard the machine.”

Axt was quick of understanding, that being a minimal qualification of a Mobile of the Ekumen; besides, the manners and affairs of Karhide, the stresses and seditions of that lively kingdom, were well known to him. Remote though Winter was, both in space and in the physiology of its inhabitants, from the rest of the human race, yet its dominant nation, Karhide, had proved a loyal member of the Ekumen. Axt’s reports were discussed in the central councils of the Ekumen eighty lightyears away; the equilibrium of the Whole rests in all its parts. Axt said, as they sat down in the great stiff chairs on the dais before the fire, “But they need not even throw switches, if you abdicate.”

“Leaving my child as heir, and a Regent of my own choice?”

“Perhaps,” Axt said with caution, “they chose your Regent for you.”

The king frowned. “I think not,” she said.

“Whom had you thought of naming?”

There was a long pause. Axt saw the muscles of Argaven’s throat working as she struggled to get a word, a name, up past a block, a harsh constriction; at last she said, in a forced, strangled whisper, “Gerer.”

Axt nodded, startled. Gerer had served as Regent for a year after Emran’s death and before Argaven’s accession; he knew her honesty and her utter devotion to the young king. “Gerer serves no faction!” he said.

Argaven shook her head. She looked exhausted. After a while she said, “Could the science of your people undo what was done to me, Lord Axt?”

“Possibly. In the Institute on Ollul. But if I sent for a specialist tonight, he’d get here twenty-four years from now… You’re sure, then, that your decision to abdicate was—” But a servant, coming in a side door behind them, set a small table by the Plenipotentiary’s chair and loaded it with fruit, sliced bread-apple, a silver tankard of ale. Argaven had noticed that her guest had missed his breakfast. Though the fare on Winter, mostly vegetable and that mostly uncooked, was dull stuff to Axt’s taste, he set to gratefully; and as serious talk was unseemly over food, Argaven shifted to generalities. “Once you said, Lord Axt, that different as I am from you, and different as my people are from yours, yet we are blood kin. Was that a moral fact, or a material one?”

Axt smiled at the very Karhidish distinction. “Both, my lord. As far as we know, which is a tiny corner of dusty space under the rafters of the Universe, all the people we’ve run into are in fact human. But the kinship goes back a million years and more, to the Fore-Eras of Hain. The ancient Hainish settled a hundred worlds.”

“We call the time before my dynasty ruled Karhide ‘ancient.’ Seven hundred years ago!”

“So we call the Age of the Enemy ‘ancient,’ and that was less than six hundred years ago. Time stretches and shrinks; changes with the eye, with the age, with the star; does all except reverse itself—or repeat.”

“The dream of the Ekumen, then, is to restore that truly ancient commonalty; to regather all the peoples of all the worlds at one hearth?”

Axt nodded, chewing bread-apple. “To weave some harmony among them, at least. Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty. All these worlds and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives and bodies on them—together they would make a splendid harmony.”

“No harmony endures,” said the young king.

“None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.” He drained his tankard, wiped his fingers on the woven-grass napkin.

“That was my pleasure as king,” said Argaven. “It is over.”

“Should—”

“It is finished. Believe me. I will keep you here, Lord Axt, until you believe me. I need your help. You are the piece the game-players forgot about! You must help me. I cannot abdicate against the will of the Council. They will refuse my abdication, force me to rule, and if I rule, I serve my enemies! If you will not help me, I will have to kill myself.” She spoke quite evenly and reasonably; but Axt knew what even the mention of suicide, the ultimately contemptible act, cost a Karhider.

“One way or the other,” said the young king.

The Plenipotentiary pulled his heavy cloak closer round him; he was cold. He had been cold for seven years, here. “My lord,” he said, “I am an alien on your world, with a handful of aides, and a little device with which I can converse with other aliens on distant worlds. I represent power, of course, but I have none. How can I help you?”

“You have a ship on Horden Island.”

“Ah. I was afraid of that,” said the Plenipotentiary, sighing. “Lord Argaven, that ship is set for Ollul, twenty-four lightyears away. Do you know what that means?”

“My escape from my time, in which I have become an instrument of evil.”

“There is no escape,” said Axt, with sudden intensity, “No, my lord. Forgive me. It is impossible. I could not consent— ”

Icy rain of spring rattled on the stones of the tower, wind whined at the angles and finials of the roof. The room was quiet, shadowy. One small shielded light burned by the door. The nurse lay snoring mildly in the bed, the baby was head down, rump up in the crib. Argaven stood beside the crib. She looked around the room, or rather saw it, knew it wholly, without looking. She too had slept here as a little child. It had been her first kingdom. It was here that she had come to suckle her child, her first-born, had sat by the fireplace while the little mouth tugged at her breast, had hummed to the baby the songs Borhub had hummed to her. This was the center, the center of, every thing.

Very cautiously and gently she slipped her hand under the baby’s warm, damp, downy head, and put over it a chain on which hung a massive ring carved with the token of the Lords of Harge. The chain was far too long, and Argaven knotted it shorter, thinking that it might twist and choke the child. So allaying that small anxiety, she tried to allay the great fear and wretchedness that filled her. She stooped down till her cheek touched the baby’s cheek, whispering inaudibly, “Emran, Emran, I have to leave you, I can’t take you, you have to rule for me. Be good, Emran, live long, rule well, be good, Emran…”

She straightened up, turned, ran from the tower room, the lost kingdom.

She knew several ways of getting out of the Palace unperceived. She took the surest, and then made for the New Harbor through the bright-lit, sleet-lashed streets of Erhenrang, alone.

Now there is no picture: no seeing her. With what eye will you watch a process that is one hundred millionth percent slower than the speed of light? She is not now a king, nor a human being; she is translated. You can scarcely call fellow-mortal one whose time passes seventy thousand times slower than yours. She is more than alone. It seems that she is not, any more than an uncommunicated thought is; that she goes nowhere, any more than a thought goes. And yet, at very nearly but never quite the speed of light, she voyages. She is the voyage. Quick as thought. She has doubled her age when she arrives, less than a day older, in the portion of space curved about a dustmote named Ollul, the fourth planet of a yellowish sun. And all this has passed in utter silence.

With noise now, and fire and meteoric dazzle enough to satisfy a Karhider’s lust for splendor, the clever ship makes earthfall, settling down in flame in the precise spot it left from some fifty-five years ago. Presently, visible, unmassive, uncertain, the young king emerges from it and stands a moment in the exitway, shielding her eyes from the light of a strange, hot sun. Axt had of course sent notice of her coming, by instantaneous transmitter, twenty-four years ago, or seventeen hours ago, depending on how you look at it; and aides and agents of the Ekumen were on hand to greet her. Even pawns did not go unnoticed by those players of the great game, and this Gethenian was, after all, a king. One of the agents had spent a year of the twenty-four in learning Karhidish, so that Argaven could speak to someone. She spoke at once: “What news from my country?”

“Mr. Mobile Axt and his successor have sent regular summaries of events, and various private messages for you; you’ll find all the material in your quarters, Mr. Harge. Very briefly, the regency of Lord Gerer was uneventful and benign; there was a depression in the first two years, during which your Arctic settlements were abandoned, but at present the economy is quite stable. Your heir was enthroned at eighteen, and has ruled now for seven years.”

“Yes. I see,” said the person who had kissed that year-old heir last night.

“Whenever you see fit, Mr. Harge, the specialists at our Institute over in Belxit— ”

“As you wish,” said Mr. Harge.

They went into her mind very gently, very subtly, opening doors. For locked doors they had delicate instruments that always found the combination; and then they stood aside, and let her enter. They found the person in black, who was not Gerer, and compassionate Rebade, who was not compassionate; they stood with her on the Palace balcony, and climbed the crevasses of nightmare with her up to the room in the tower; and at last the one who was to have been first, the person in red and white, approached her saying, “Majesty! A plot against your life—” And Mr. Harge screamed in abject terror, and woke up.

“Well! That was the trigger. The signal to begin tripping off the other instructions and determine the course of your phobia. An induced paranoia. Really beautifully induced, I must say. Here, drink this, Mr. Harge. No, it’s just water! You might well have become a remarkably vicious ruler, increasingly obsessed by fear of plots and subversions, increasingly disaffected from your people. Not overnight, of course. That’s the beauty of it. It would have taken several years for you to become a real tyrant; though they no doubt planned some boosts along the way, once Rebade wormed his way— her way—a way into your confidence… Well, well, I see why Karhide is well spoken of, over at the Clearinghouse. If you’ll pardon my objectivity, this kind of skill and patience is quite rare…“ So the doctor, the mindmender, the hairy, greyish, one-sexed person from somewhere called the Cetians, went rambling on while the patient recovered herself.

“Then I did right,” said Mr. Harge at last.

“You did. Abdication, suicide, or escape were the only acts of consequence which you could have committed of your own volition, freely. They counted on your moral veto on suicide, and your Council’s vote on abdication. But being possessed by ambition themselves, they forgot the possibility of abnegation, and left one door open for you. A door which only a strong-minded person, if you’ll pardon my literalness, could choose to go through. I really must read up on this other mindscience of yours, what do you call it, Foretelling? Thought it was some occultist trash, but quite evidently… Well, well, I expect they’ll be wanting you to look in at the Clearinghouse soon, to discuss your future, now that we’ve put your past where it belongs, eh?”

“As you wish,” said Mr. Harge.

She talked with various people there in the Clearinghouse of the Ekumen for the West Worlds, and when they suggested that she go to school, she assented readily. For among those mild persons, whose chief quality seemed a cool, profound sadness indistinguishable from a warm, profound hilarity—among them, the ex-king of Karhide knew herself a barbarian, unlearned and unwise.

She attended Ekumenical School. She lived in barracks near the Clearinghouse in Vaxtsit City, with a couple of hundred other aliens, none of whom was either androgynous or an ex-king. Never having owned much that was hers alone, and never having had much privacy, she did not mind barracks life; nor was it so bad as she had expected to live among single-sexed people, although she found their condition of perpetual kemmer tiresome. She did not mind anything much, getting through the works and days with vigor and competence but always a certain heedlessness, as of one whose center is somewhere else. The only discomfort was the heat, the awful heat of Ollul that rose sometimes to 35° C in the blazing interminable season when no snow fell for two hundred days on end. Even when winter came at last she sweated, for it seldom got more than ten degrees below freezing outside, and the barracks were kept sweltering—she thought—though the other aliens wore heavy sweaters all the time. She slept on top of her bed, naked and thrashing, and dreamed of the snows of the Kargav, the ice in Old Harbor, the ice scumming one’s ale on cool mornings in the Palace, the cold, the dear and bitter cold of Winter.

She learned a good deal. She had already learned that the Earth was, here, called Winter, and that Ollul was, here, called the Earth: one of those facts which turn the universe inside out like a sock. She learned that a meat diet causes diarrhea in the unaccustomed gut. She learned that single-sexed people, whom she tried hard not to think of as perverts, tried hard not to think of her as a pervert. She learned that when she pronounced Ollul as Orrur some people laughed. She attempted also to unlearn that she was a king. Once the School took her in hand she learned and unlearned much more. She was led, by all the machines and devices and experiences and (simplest and most demanding) words that the Ekumen had at its disposal, into an intimation of what it might be to understand the nature and history of a kingdom that was over a million years old and trillions of miles wide. When she had begun to guess the immensity of this kingdom of humanity and the durable pain and monotonous waste of its history, she began also to see what lay beyond its borders in space and time, and among naked rocks and furnace-suns and the shining desolation that goes on and on she glimpsed the sources of hilarity and serenity, the inexhaustible springs. She learned a great many facts, numbers, myths, epics, proportions, relationships, and so forth, and saw, beyond the borders of what she had learned, the unknown again, a splendid immensity. In this augmentation of her mind and being there was great satisfaction; yet she was unsatisfied. They did not always let her go on as far as she wanted into certain fields, mathematics, Cetian physics. “You started late, Mr. Harge,” they said, “we have to build on the existing foundations. Besides, we want you in subjects which you can put to use.”

“What use?”

They—the ethnographer Mr. Mobile Gist represented Them at the moment, across a library table—looked at her sardonically. “Do you consider yourself to be of no further use, Mr. Harge?”

Mr. Harge, who was generally reserved, spoke with sudden fury: “I do.”

“A king without a country,” said Gist in his flat Terran accent, “self-exiled, believed to be dead, might feel a trifle superfluous. But then, why do you think we’re bothering with you?”

“Out of kindness.”

“Oh, kindness… However kind we are, we can give you nothing that would make you happy, you know. Except… Well. Waste is a pity. You were indubitably the right king for Winter, for Karhide, for the purposes of the Ekumen. You have a sense of balance. You might even have unified the planet. You certainly wouldn’t have terrorized and fragmented the country, as the present king seems to be doing. What a waste! Only consider our hopes and needs, Mr. Harge, and your own qualifications, before you despair of being useful in your life. Forty or fifty more years of it you have to live, after all…”

The last snapshot taken by alien sunlight: erect, in a Hainish-style cloak of grey, a handsome person of indeterminate sex stands, sweating profusely, on a green lawn beside the chief Agent of the Ekumen in the West Worlds, the Stabile, Mr. Hoalans of Alb, who can meddle (if he likes) with the destinies of forty worlds.

“I can’t order you to go there, Argaven,” says the Stabile. “Your own conscience— ”

“I gave up my kingdom to my conscience, twelve years ago. It’s had its due. Enough’s enough,” says Argaven Harge. Then she laughs suddenly, so that the Stabile also laughs; and they part in such harmony as the Powers of the Ekumen desire between human souls.

Horden Island, off the south coast of Karhide, was given as a freehold to the Ekumen by the Kingdom of Karhide during the reign of Argaven XV. No one lived there. Yearly generations of seawalkies crawled up on the barren rocks, and laid and hatched their eggs, and raised their young, and finally led them back in long single file to the sea. But once every ten or twenty years fire ran over the rocks and the sea boiled on the shores, and if any seawalkies were on the island then they died.

When the sea had ceased to boil, the Plenipotentiary’s little electric launch approached. The starship ran out a gossamer-steel gangplank to the deck of the launch, and one person started to walk up it as another one started to walk down it, so that they met in the middle, in midair, between sea and land, an ambiguous meeting.

“Ambassador Horrsed? I’m Harge,” said the one from the starship, but the one from the launch was already kneeling, saying aloud, in Karhidish, “Welcome, Argaven of Karhide!”

As he straightened up the Ambassador added in a quick whisper, “You come as yourself— Explain when I can— ” Behind and below him on the deck of the launch stood a sizable group of people, staring up intently at the newcomer. All were Karhiders by their looks; several were very old.

Argaven Harge stood for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, erect and perfectly motionless, though her grey cloak tugged and riffled in the cold sea wind. She looked then once at the dull sun in the west, once at the grey land north across the water, back again at the silent people grouped below her on the deck. She strode forward so suddenly that Ambassador Horrsed had to squeeze out of the way in a hurry. She went straight to one of the old people on the deck of the launch. “Are you Ker rem ir Kerheder?”

“I am.”

“I knew you by the lame arm, Ker.” She spoke clearly; there was no guessing what emotions she felt. “I could not know your face. After sixty years. Are there others of you I knew? I am Argaven.”

They were all silent. They gazed at her.

All at once one of them, one scored and scarred with age like wood that has been through fire, stepped forward one step. “My liege, I am Bannith of the Palace Guard. You served with me when I was Drillmaster and you a child, a young child.” And the grey head bowed down suddenly, in homage, or to hide tears. Then another stepped forward, and another. The heads that bowed were grey, white, bald; the voices that hailed the king quavered. One, Ker of the crippled arm, whom Argaven had known as a shy page of thirteen, spoke fiercely to those who still stood unmoving: “This is the king. I have eyes that have seen, and that see now. This is the king!”

Argaven looked at them, face after face, the bowed heads and the unbowed.

“I am Argaven,” she said. “I was king. Who reigns now in Karhide?”

“Emran,” one answered.

“My child Emran?”

“Yes, my liege,” old Bannith said; most of the faces were blank; but Ker said in her fierce shaking voice, “Argaven, Argaven reigns in Karhide! I have lived to see the bright days return. Long live the king!”

One of the younger ones looked at the others, and said resolutely, “So be it. Long live the king!” And all the heads bowed low.

Argaven took their homage unperturbed, but as soon as a moment came when she could address Horrsed the Plenipotentiary alone she demanded, “What is this? What has happened? Why was I misled? I was told I was to come here to assist you, as an aide, from the Ekumen— ”

“That was twenty-four years ago,” said the Ambassador, apologetically. “I’ve only lived here five years, my lord. Things are going very ill in Karhide. King Emran broke off relations with the Ekumen last year. I don’t really know what the Stabile’s purpose in sending you here was at the time he sent you; but at present, we’re losing Winter. So the Agents on Hain suggested to me that we might move out our king.”

“But I am dead,” Argaven said wrathfully. “I have been dead for sixty years!”

“The king is dead,” said Horrsed. “Long live the king.”

As some of the Karhiders approached, Argaven turned from the Ambassador and went over to the rail. Grey water bubbled and slid by the ship’s side. The shore of the continent lay now to their left, grey patched with white. It was cold: a day of early winter in the Ice Age. The ship’s engine purred softly. Argaven had not heard that purr of an electric engine for a dozen years now, the only kind of engine Karhide’s slow and stable Age of Technology had chosen to employ. The sound of it was very pleasant to her.

She spoke abruptly without turning, as one who has known since infancy that there is always someone there to answer: “Why are we going east?”

“We’re making for Kerm Land.”

“Why Kerm Land?”

It was one of the younger ones who had come forward to answer. “Because that part of the country is in rebellion against the— against King Emran. I am a Kermlander: Perreth ner Sode.”

“Is Emran in Erhenrang?”

“Erhenrang was taken by Orgoreyn, six years ago. The king is in the new capital, east of the mountains—the Old Capital, actually, Rer.”

“Emran lost the West Fall?” Argaven said, and then turning full on the stout young noble, “Lost the West Fall? Lost Erhenrang?”

Perreth drew back a step, but answered promptly, “We’ve been in hiding behind the mountains for six years.”

“The Orgota are in Erhenrang?”

“King Emran signed a treaty with Orgoreyn five years ago, ceding them the Western Provinces.”

“A shameful treaty, your majesty,” old Ker broke in, fiercer and shakier than ever. “A fool’s treaty! Emran dances to the drums of Orgoreyn. All of us here are rebels, exiles. The Ambassador there is an exile, in hiding!”

“The West Fall,” Argaven said. “Argaven I took the West Fall for Karhide seven hundred years ago—” She looked round on the others again with her strange, keen, unheeding gaze. “Emran—” she began, but halted. “How strong are you in Kerm Land? Is the Coast with you?”

“Most Hearths of the South and East are with us.” Argaven was silent a while. “Did Emran ever bear an heir?”

“No heir of the flesh, my liege,” Bannith said. “She sired six.”

“She has named Girvry Harge rem ir Orek as her heir,” said Perreth.

“Girvry? What kind of name is that? The kings of Karhide are named Emran,” Argaven said, “and Argaven.”

Now at last comes the dark picture, the snapshot taken by firelight —firelight, because the power plants of Rer are wrecked, the trunk lines cut, and half the city is on fire. Snow flurries heavily down above the flames and gleams red for a moment before it melts in mid air, hissing faintly.

Snow and ice and guerrilla troops keep Orgoreyn at bay on the west side of the Kargav Mountains. No help came to the Old King, Emran, when her country rose against her. Her guards fled, her city burns, and now at the end she is face to face with the usurper. But she has, at the end, something of her family’s heedless pride. She pays no attention to the rebels. She stares at them and does not see them, lying in the dark hallway, lit only by mirrors that reflect distant fires, the gun with which she killed herself near her hand.

Stooping over the body Argaven lifts up that cold hand, and starts to take from the age-knotted forefinger the massive, carved, gold ring. But she does not do it. “Keep it,” she whispers, “keep it.” For a moment she bends yet lower, as if she whispered in the dead ear, or laid her cheek against that cold and wrinkled face. Then she straightens up, and stands a while, and presently goes out through dark corridors, by windows bright with distant ruin, to set her house in order: Argaven, Winter’s king.