The Dispossessed: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

The Urrasti Council of World Governments has had its seat in Roddared, the old capital of Avan Provice, for the entire three hundred years of its existence. The city is just an hour by trail from Nio Esseia. The Terran embassy is also located in Roddared, and Shevek arrives there at seven in the morning and asks to see the Terran ambassador. He is told by a clerk that the embassy does not open until eight—the ambassador is at breakfast, and Shevek must make an appointment to see her.

Shevek remains steadfast, insisting on seeing the ambassador right away. While the clerk dials a telephone, two men enter the lobby from another part of the building, and Shevek runs around the reception desk toward them, begging them for help. One man takes Shevek’s arm and leads him into an office. He asks Shevek if he is one of the strikers from Nio Esseia, and Shevek introduces himself as a scientist from Anarres. The man asks Shevek if he is seeking asylum, but before Shevek can answer, the man whisks him away further into the embassy. 

Many people descend upon Shevek, removing his bloody coat and tending to him. The men and women surrounding him tell him that he is on Terran soil, and is safe. Shevek is perplexed by the Terrans’ strange, “childlike” features. Exhausted, Shevek lies down, still protesting that he wants to see the Ambassador. One of the women standing above him informs him that she is the Ambassador—her name is Keng, and they will speak after he rests. Shevek thinks the woman’s voice sounds like Takver’s, and he cries out for his partner before falling asleep.

After sleeping for two days, Shevek is fed, dressed, and shown into the Ambassador’s office. The Ambassador, Keng, apologizes for the fact that the two must speak in Iotic—the only common tongue they share, though it is foreign to both of them. Keng informs Shevek that people from Anarres have been radioing the Ioti government and asking urgently to speak with Shevek. The Ioti are embarrassed, as they do not know where Shevek is “officially”—though Keng informs Shevek that because there are many Ioti clerks and secretaries working at the embassy, the government is probably aware on some level of his whereabouts.

Because the Terran embassy is to the Council of World Governments and not the nation of A-Io, Keng says, Shevek brings no risk or burden upon the Terrans by seeking refuge with them. She tells Shevek that if he needs to get a message to Anarres, they can easily arrange a conversation with his home planet using a transmitter onboard their ship, which is Hainish—Hain and Terra work together peacefully.

Keng tells Shevek that she heard his demonstration speech on the clandestine radio, and was moved by his words. She asks him how he escaped the strike, and how he made it to the embassy. Shevek reveals that he traveled under the backseat of a taxi—some people, presumably fellow revolutionaries, commandeered a cab in order to get him to safety.

Keng admits that she knows almost nothing about Anarres—she only knows what the Urrasti have told her. She believes Anarres to be a “rather unimportant [but] interesting experiment,” and wants Shevek to tell her more about it. Furthermore, she wonders why the Ioti government, knowing such unrest exists just under their noses on their own planet, would bring Shevek—a symbol of anarchy in practice—to Urras.

Shevek tells Keng that he was meant to be kept away from the unrest, confined to the University among scholars and the rich. He also tells Keng that his research was going to be stolen by the government so that they could use it to threaten Terra and Hain with “the annihilation of space.” Shevek explains that what the Ioti government ultimately wants is instantaneous transferal of matter across space, or transilience. With the help of Shevek’s equations, he admits, the telephone-like ansible will be possible, though transilience remains far-off according to his calculations. Though men and matter cannot leap the great gaps between worlds yet, ideas may soon be able to. Keng excitedly remarks that the ansible would change the lives of billions, and would make a league of worlds possible.

Shevek explains to Keng why he came to this world: he came for the sake of his idea—to learn it, teach it, and share in it. On Anarres, which is cut off from the rest of the galaxy, he could not finish his work—and even if he could, no Anarresti saw any use in it. Now he has finished the work, though he has not written it out yet, but the ideas in his head are not the only ones important to him. The idea of his society is also important, and he refuses to let the propertarians buy the truth from him. Shevek wants to give his idea as a gift—to Terra, Hain, and all the other worlds, so that it may only be used for common good. He refuses to serve any master, he says, and will not waste any more time on greed, profiteering, and lies.

Keng asks Shevek about Anarres, and about why he left. Shevek says that he left because he was frustrated by his people’s refusal to look outward. He now realizes he was wrong to leave—there is nothing on Urras that the Anarresti need. When the Odonians left nearly two hundred years ago with empty hands, Shevek says, they were right to do so—there is nothing on Urras, he believes, but lies, weapons, and misery. There is no way to act right on Urras, and no way to truly do good to another. Urras, he says, is Hell.

Keng tells Shevek that to her and her fellow Terrans, Urras is “the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of all the worlds, [and] the world that comes [closest] to Paradise,” despite all the pain and hardship present in it. Keng reveals that her home planet of Earth is now a ruin, “spoiled by the human species.” Because Terrans could not control their appetites or their violence, they destroyed themselves and their planet. The Hainish, the altruists of the universe, have helped Terrans to rebuild and survive, giving them the gifts of ships that allowed them to leave their ruined world. To the Terrans, stripped of their home planet, Urras means Paradise. Shevek asks what Anarres would mean to the Terrans, and Keng replies that she does not know—her people have no chance at Anarres anyway, sealed off from the galaxy as it is.

Shevek tells Keng that she does not understand time. Haunted by a wasted past and fearful of an impossible future, Terrans focus on “nothing but the rich, real, stable present, the moment now.” The present cannot be possessed, however, Shevek argues—the present is not stable by any means. Shevek attempts to force Keng to see the mutability of time and the coexistence of past, present, and future, but Keng does not understand what he is saying, and Shevek does not attempt to explain himself any further.

Keng asks Shevek why it is he came to her in the first place. Shevek tells her that he wants to give her his theory to save it from becoming Ioti property. He hopes that she will broadcast the equations and give them to physicists all over Urras, as well as those on Hain and throughout the rest of the galaxy. Keng is more than willing to do so, and asks Shevek where it is he plans to go.

Shevek asks Keng for her help in returning home to Anarres—he does not want to be jailed or killed in Hell. He thinks that being sent home to Anarres would satisfy his own desires as well as the Urrasti’s—“dead anarchists make martyrs, but absent ones can be forgotten.” Shevek apologizes for not having anything to give the Terrans in return for his theory, and Keng asks if he really thinks he is giving them “nothing.” Shevek tells her to weigh his theory against the freedom of one human spirit—he cannot tell which will weigh heavier.