The Dispossessed

by Ursula K. Le Guin

He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had ever feared death. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.

“Oh, with him it’s religious bigotry. He’s a strict-interpretation Epiphanist. Recites the Primes every night. A totally rigid mind.”

“You admit no religion outside the churches, just as you admit no morality outside the laws. You know, I had not ever understood that, in all my reading of Urrasti books.”

These latter Shevek found entertaining; everything was so lavish, stylish, and inventive; but the furniture of Kimoe’s intellect he did not find so comfortable. Kimoe’s ideas never seemed to be able to go in a straight line; they had to walk around this and avoid that, and then they ended up smack against a wall. There were walls around all his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them though he was perpetually hiding behind them.

This matter of superiority and inferiority must be a central one in Urrasti social life. If to respect himself Kimoe had to consider half the human race as inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they consider men inferior? And how did all that affect their sex-lives? He knew from Odo’s writings that, two hundred years ago, the main Urrasti sexual institutions had been “marriage”, a partnership authorised and enforced by legal and economic sanctions, and “prostitution”, which seemed merely to be a wider term, copulation in the economic mode. Odo had condemned them both; and yet Odo had been “married”; and anyhow the institutions might have changed greatly in two hundred years. If he was going to live on Urras and with the Urrasti, he had better find out.