I needed clothes fit for a dinner-party, having lost my good Erhenrang suit in the raid on Siuwensin, so that afternoon I took a Government taxi downtown and brought myself an Orgota rig. Hieb and shirt were much as in Karhide, but instead of summer breeches they wore thigh-high leggings the year round, baggy and cumbrous; the colors were loud blues or reds, and the cloth and cut and make were all a little shoddy. It was standardized work. The clothes showed me what it was that this impressive, massive city lacked: elegance. Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it. I went back to Shusgis’ house and reveled in the hot showerbath, which came at one from all sides in a kind of prickly mist. I thought of the cold tin tubs of East Karhide that I had chattered and shuddered in last summer, the ice-ringed basin in my Erhenrang room. Was that elegance? Long live comfort! I put on my gaudy red finery, and was driven with Shusgis to the supper-party in his chauffeured private car. There are more servants, more services in Orgoreyn than in Karhide. This is because all Orgota are employees of the state; the state must find employment for all citizens, and does so. This, at least, is the accepted explanation, though like most economic explanations it seems, under certain lights, to omit the main point.
Commensal Slose’s fiercely-lighted, high, white reception room held twenty or thirty guests, three of them Commensals and all of them evidently notables of one kind or another. This was more than a group of Orgota curious to see “the alien.” I was not a curiosity, as I had been for a whole year in Karhide; not a freak; not a puzzle. I was, it seemed, a key.
What door was I to unlock? Some of them had a notion, these statesmen and officials who greeted me effusively, but I had none.
I wouldn’t find out during supper. All over Winter, even in frozen barbarian Perunter, it is considered execrably vulgar to talk business while eating. As supper was served promptly I postponed my questions and attended to a gummy fish soup and to my host and fellow guests. Slose was a frail, youngish person, with unusually light, bright eyes and a muted, intense voice; he looked like an idealist, a dedicated soul. I liked his manner, but I wondered what it was he was dedicated to. On my left sat another Commensal, a fat-faced fellow named Obsle. He was gross, genial, and inquisitive. By the third sip of soup he was asking me what the devil was I really born on some other world—what was it like there—warmer than Gethen, everybody said—how warm?
“Well, in this same latitude on Terra, it never snows.”
“It never snows. It never snows?” He laughed with real enjoyment, as a child laughs at a good lie, encouraging further flights.
“Our sub-arctic regions are rather like your habitable zone; we’re farther out of our last Ice Age than you, but not out, you see. Fundamentally Terra and Gethen are very much alike. All the inhabited worlds are. Men can live only within a narrow range of environments; Geth-en’s at one extreme…”
“Then there are worlds hotter than yours?”
“Most of them are warmer. Some are hot; Gde, for instance. It’s mostly sand and rock desert. It was warm to start with, and an exploitive civilization wrecked its natural balances fifty or sixty thousand years ago, burned up the forests for kindling, as it were. There are still people there, but it resembles—if I understand the Text —the Yomesh idea of where thieves go after death.”
That drew a grin from Obsle, a quiet, approving grin which made me suddenly revise my estimation of the man.
“Some subcultists hold that those Afterlife Interims are actually, physically situated on other worlds, other planets of the real universe. Have you met with that idea, Mr. Ai?”
“No; I’ve been variously described, but nobody’s yet explained me away as a ghost.” As I spoke I chanced to look to my right, and saying “ghost” saw one. Dark, in dark clothing, still and shadowy, he sat at my elbow, the specter at the feast.