Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin

Author:Ursula K Le Guin [Guin, Ursula K Le]
Format: epub
Tags: sf
Published: 2010-10-16T22:00:00+00:00

Shevek sat beside her at the dinner table. He kept looking at her bare breasts, pushed upward by the stiff bodice. The notion of going thus half naked in freezing weather was extravagant, as extravagant as the snow, and the small breasts had also an innocent whiteness, like the snow. The curve of her neck went up smoothly into the curve of the proud, shaven, delicate head.

She really is quite attractive. Shevek informed himself. She's like the beds here: soft.

Affected, though. Why does she mince out her words like that?

He clung to her rather thin voice and mincing manner as to a raft on deep water, and never knew it, never knew he was drowning. She was going back to Nio Esseia on the train after dinner, she had merely come out for the day and he would never see her again.

Oiie had a cold, Sewa was busy with the children. "Shevek, do you think you might walk Vea to the station?"

"Good Lord, Demaerel Don't make the poor man protect me! You don't think there'll be wolves, do you? Wil savage Mingrads come sweeping into town and abduct me to their harems? Will I be found on the stationmaster's doorstep tomorrow morning, a tear frozen in my eye and my tiny, rigid hands clasping a bunch of withered posies? Oh, I do rather like that!" Over Vea's rattling, tinkling talk her laugh broke like a wave, a dark, smooth, powerful wave that washed out everything and left the sand empty. She did not laughed with herself and at herself, the body's dark laughter, wiping out words.

Shevek put on his coat in the hall and was waiting for her at the door.

They walked in silence for a half a block. Snow crunched and squeaked under their feet.

"You're real y much too polite for ..."

"For what?"

"For an anarchist," she said, in her thin and affectedly drawling voice (it was the same intonation Pae used, and Oiie when he was at the University). "I'm disappointed. I thought you'd be dangerous and uncouth."

"I am."

She glanced up at him sidelong. She wore a scarlet shawl tied over her head; her eyes looked black and bright against the vivid color and the whiteness of snow all around.

"But here you are tamely walking me to the station, Dr. Shevek."

"Shevek," he said mildly. "No 'doctor.'"

"Is that your whole name — first and last?"

He nodded, smiling. He felt well and vigorous, pleased by the bright air, the warmth of the well-made coat he wore, the prettiness of the woman beside him. No worries or heavy thoughts had hold on him today.

"Is it true that you get your names from a computer?"

"Yes."

"How dreary, to be named by a machine!"

"Why dreary?"

"It's so mechanical, so impersonal."

"But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?"

"No one else? You're the only Shevek?"

"While I live. There were others, before me."

"Relatives, you mean?"

"We don't count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see. I don't know who they were, except for one, in the early years of the Settlement.

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