Chapter I

^asse^           ifftfma







There was a wall. It did not look important It was built of
uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right
over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed
the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into
mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea
was real. It was important. For seven generations there
had been nothing in the world more important than that
wafl.

Like aB walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was
inside it and what was outside it depended upon which
side of it you were on.

Looked at from one side, the watt enclosed a barren
sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field
there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad,
three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The
dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no
gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was
even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine.
The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the
ships that came down out of space, and the men that came
on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest
1

of- the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres
outside, free.

Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anar-
res: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp,
cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.

A number of people were coming along the road to-
wards the landing field, or standing around where the road
cut through the wall.

People often came out from the nearby city of Abbenay
in hopes of seeing a spaceship, or simply to see the wall.
After all, it was the only boundary wall on their world.
Nowhere else could they see a sign that said No Trespass-
ing. Adolescents, particularly, were drawn to it. They came
up to the wall; they sat on it. There might be a gang to
watch, offloading crates from track trucks at the ware-
houses. There might even be a freighter on the pad.
Freighters came down only eight times a year, unan-
nounced except to syndics actually working at the Port, so
when the spectators were lucky enough to see one they
were excited, at first. But there they sat, and there it sat, a
squat black tower in a mess of movable cranes, away off
across the field. And then a woman came over from one
of the warehouse crews and said, "We're shutting down
for today, brothers." She was wearing the Defense arm-
band, a sight almost as rare as a spaceship. That was a bit
of a thrill. But though her tone was mild, it was final.
She was the foreman of this gang, and if provoked would
be backed up by her syndics. And anyhow there wasn't
anything to see. The aliens, the off-woriders, stayed hiding
in their ship. No show.

It was a dull show for the Defense crew, too. Some-
times the foreman wished that somebody would just try to
cross the wall, an alien crewman jumping ship, or a kid
from Abbenay trying to sneak in for a closer look at the
freighter. But it never happened. Nothing ever happened.
When something did happen she wasn't ready for it

The captain of the freighter Mindful said to her, "Is that
mob after my ship?"

The foreman looked and saw that in fact there was a
real crowd around the gate, a hundred or more people.
They were standing around, just standing, the way people
had stood at produce-train stations during the Famine. It
gave the foreman a scare.

2

**No. They, ah, protest," she said in her slow and limited
lotic. "Protest the, ah, you know. Passenger?"

"You mean they're after this bastard we're supposed to
take? Are they going to try to stop him, or us?"

The word "bastard," untranslatable in the foreman's lan-
guage; meant nothing to her except some kind of foreign
term for her people, but she had never liked the sound of
it, or the captain's tone, or the captain. "Can you look
after you?" she asked briefly.

**HeU, yea. You just get the rest of this cargo omoaded,
quick. And get this passenger bastard on board. No mob of
Oddies is about to give us any trouble.*' He patted the
thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed
penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman.

She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a
weapon, a cold glance. "Ship will be loaded by fourteen
hours." she said. "Keep crew on board safe. Liftoff at
fourteen hours forty. If you need help, leave message on
tape at Ground Control" She strode off before the captain
could one-up her. Anger made her more forceful with her
crew and the crowd. •'Clear the road theret" she ordered
as she neared the waD. "Trucks are coming through, some-
body's going to get hurt. Clear asidel"

The men and women in the crowd argued with her and
with one another. They kept crossing the road, and some
came inside the wall. Yet they did more or less clear th&
way. If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob,
they had no experience in being one. Members of a com-
munity, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved
by mass feeling; there were as many emotions there as
there were people. And they did not expect commands to
bo arbitrary, so they had no practice in disobeying them.
Their inexperience saved the passenger's life.

Some of them had come there to kill a traitor. Others
had come to prevent him from leaving, or to yell insults
at him, or just to look at him; and all these others ob-
structed the sheer brief path of the assassins. None of them
had firearms, though a couple had knives. Assault to them
meant bodily assault; they wanted to take the traitor into
their own hands. They expected him to come guarded, in a
vehicle. While they were trying to inspect a goods truck
and arguing with its outraged driver, the man they wanted
came walking up the road, alone. When they recognized
3

him he was already halfway across the field, with five De-
fense syndics following him. Those who had wanted to kill
him resorted to pursuit, too-late, and to rock throwing, not
quite too late. They barely winged the man they wanted,
just as he got to the ship, but a two-pound flint caught one
of the Defense crew on the side of the head and killed
him on die spot.

The hatches of the ship closed. The Defense crew turned
back, carrying their dead companion; they made no effort
to stop the leaders of the crowd who came racing towards
the ship, though the foreman, white with shock and rage,
cursed them to hell as they ran past, and they swerved to
avoid her. Once at the ship, the vanguard of the crowd
scattered and stood irresolute. The silence of the ship, the
abrupt movements of the huge skeletal gantries, the strange
burned look of the ground, the absence of anything in
human scale, disoriented them. A blast of steam or gas
from something connected with the ship made some of
them start; they looked up uneasily at the rockets, vast
black tunnels overhead. A siren whooped in warning, far
across the field. First one person and then another started
back towards the gate. Nobody stopped them. Within ten
minutes the field was clear, the crowd scattered out along
the road to Abbenay. Nothing appeared to have happened,
after all.

Inside the Mindful a great deal was happening. Since
Ground Control had pushed launch time up, all routines
had to be rushed through in double time. The captain had
ordered that the passenger be strapped down and locked
in, in the crew lounge, along with the doctor, to get them
out from underfoot There was a screen in there, they
could watch the liftoff if they liked.

The passenger watched. He saw the field, and the wall
around the field, and far outside the wall the distant slopes
of the Ne Theras, speckled with scrub holum and sparse,
silvery moonthom.

AH this suddenly rushed dazzling down the screen. The
passenger felt his head pressed back against the padded
rest. It was like a dentist's examination, the head pressed
back, the jaw forced open. He could not get his breath, he
felt sick, he felt bis bowels loosen with fear. His whole
body cried out to the enormous forces that had taken
hold of him. Not now, not yet, wait!
4

His eyes saved him. What they insisted on seeing and re-
porting to him took him out of the autism of terror. For
on the screen now was a strange sight, a great pallid plain
of stone. It was the desert seen from the mountains above
Grand Valley. How had he got back to Grand Valley? He
tried to tell himself that he was in an airship. No, in a
spaceship. The edge of the plain flashed with the brightness
of light on water, light across a distant sea. There was no
water in those deserts. What was he seeing, then? The
stone plain was no longer plane but hollow, like a huge
bowl full of sunlight. As he watched in wonder it grew
shallower, spilling out its light All at once a line broke
across it, abstract, geometric, the perfect section of a cir-
cle. Beyond that arc was blackness. This blackness re-
versed the whole picture, made it negative. The real, the
stone part of it was no longer concave and full of light but
convex, reflecting, rejecting light. It was not a plain or a
bowl but a sphere, a ball of white stone falling down in
blackness, falling away. It was his world.

"I don't understand," he said aloud.

Someone answered him. For a while he failed to com-
prehend that the person standing by his chair was speaking
to him, answering him, for he no longer understood what
an answer is. He was clearly aware of only one thing, his
own total isolation. The world bad fallen out from under
him, and be was left alone.

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

He was able at last to look up at the man standing be-
side him. It was a stranger, of course. From now on there
would be only strangers. He was speaking in a foreign
language: lotic. The words made sense. All the little
things made sense; only the whole thing did not. The man
was saying something about the straps that held him into
the chair. He fumbled at them. The chair swung upright,
and he nearly fell out of if being giddy and off balance.
The man kept asking if someone had been hurt. Who was
he talking about? "Is he sure he didn't get hurt?" The polite
form of direct address in lotic was in the third person.
The man meant him, himself. He did not know why he
should have been hurt; the man kept saying something
about throwing rocks. But the rock will never hit, he
5

thought. He looked back at the screen for the rock, the
white stone falling down in darkness, but the screen had

gone blank.

**I am well»" he said at last, at random.
It did not appease the man. "Please come with me. I'm

a doctor."
"I am well.**

Tiease come with me, Dr. Shevek!"
^ou are a doctor," Shevek said after a pause. "I am

not. I am called Shevek."

The doctor, a short, fair, bald man, grimaced with
anxiety. "You should be in your cabin, sir—danger of in-
fection—you weren't to be in contact with anybody but
me, I've been through two weeks of disinfection for noth-
ing, God damn that captain! Please come with me, sir. I'll

be held responsible—"

Shevek perceived that the little man was upset He felt
no compunction, no sympathy; but even where he was, in
absolute solitude, the one law held, the one law he had
ever acknowledged. "All right," he said, and stood up.

He still felt dizzy, and his right shoulder hurt. He knew
the ship must be moving, but there was no sense of mo-
tion; there was only a silence, an awful, utter silence, just
outside the walls. The doctor led him through silent metal

corridors to a room.

It was a very small room, with seamed, blank walls. It
repelled Shevek, reminding him of a place he did not want
to remember. He stopped in the doorway. But the doctor
urged and pleaded, and he went on in.

He sat down on the shelf-like bed, still feeling light-
headed and lethargic, and watched the doctor incuriously.
He felt he ought to be curious; this man was the first Ur"
rasti he had ever seen. But he was too tired. He could have
lain back and gone straight to sleep.

He had been up all the night before, going through his
papers. Three days ago he had seen Takver and the chil-
dren off to Peace-and-Plenty, and ever since then he had
been busy, running out to the radio tower to exchange
last-minute messages with people on Unas, discussing
plans and possibilities with Bedap and the others. All
through those hurried days, ever since Takver left, he had
felt not that he was doing all the things he did, but that
they were doing him. He had been in other people's bands.
6

His own will had not acted. It had had no need to act. It
was his own will that had started it all, that had created
this moment and these walls about him now. How long
ago? Years. Five years ago, in the silence of night in
Chakar in tke mountains, when he had said to Takver, "I
will go to Abbenay and unbuild walls." Before then, even;

long before, in the Dust, in the years of famine and de-
spair, when he had promised himself that he would never
act again but by his own free choice. And following that
promise he had brought himself here: to this moment
without time, this place without an earth, this little room,
this prison.

The doctor had examined his bruised shoulder (the
bruise puzzled Shevek; he had been too tense and hurried
to realize what had been going on at the landing field, and
had never felt the rock strike him). Now be turned to him
holding a hypodermic needle.

"I do not want that," Shevek said. His spoken lotic was
slow, and, as he knew from the radio exchanges, badly
pronounced, but it was grammatical enough; he had more
difficulty understanding than speaking.

"This is measles vaccine." said the doctor, professionally
deaf.

"No," Shevek said.

The doctor chewed his lip for a moment and said, "Do
you know what measles is, sir?"

'•No."

"A disease. Contagious. Often severe in adults. You
don't have it on Anarres; prophylactic measures kept it
out when the planet was settled. It's common on Urras. It
could kill you. So could a dozen other common viral in-
fections. You have no resistance. Are you right-banded,
sir?"

Shevek automatically shook his head. With the grace of
a prestidigitator the doctor slid the needle into his right
arm. Shevek submitted to this and other injections in si-
lence. He had no right to suspicion or protest. He had
yielded himself up to these people; he had given up his
birthright of decision. It was gone, fallen away from him
along with bis world, the world of the Promise, the barren
stone.

The doctor spoke again, but he did not listen.

For hours or days he existed in a vacancy, a dry and

7

wretched void without past or future. The walls stood tight
about him. Outside them was the silence. His arms and
buttocks ached from injections; he ran a fever that never
quite heightened to delirium but left him in a limbo be-
tween reason and unreason, no man's land. Time did not
pass. There was no time. He was time: he only. He was
the river, the arrow, the stone. But he did not move. The
thrown rock kung still at midpoint. There was no day or
night Sometimes the doctor switched the light off, or on.
There was a dock set in the wall by the bed; its pointer
moved from one to another of the twenty figures of the
dial, meaningless.

He woke after long, deep sleep, and since he was facing
the dock, studied it sleepily. Its pointer stood at a little
after 15, which, if the dial was read from midnight like
the 24-hour Anarresti clock, should mean that it was mid-
aftemoon. But how could it he midaftemoon in space be-
tween two worlds? Well, the ship would keep its own time,
after alL Figuring all this out heartened him immensely.
He sat up and did not feel giddy. He got out of bed and
tested his balance: satisfactory, though he felt that the
soles of his feet were not quite firmly in contact with the
floor. The ship's gravity field must be rather weak. He did
not much like the feeling; what he needed was steadiness,
solidity, firm fact. In search of these he began methodi-
cally to investigate the little room.

The blank walls were full of surprises, all ready to re-
veal themselves at a touch on the panel: washstand, shit-
stool, mirror, desk, chair, closet, shelves. There were sev-
eral completely mysterious electrical devices connected
with the washstand, and the water valve did not cut off
when you released the faucet but kept pouring out until
shut off—a sign, Shevek thought, either of great faith ia
human nature, or of great quantities of hot water. Assum-
ing the latter, he washed all over, and finding no towel,
dried himself with one of the mysterious devices, which
emitted a pleasant tickling blast of warm air. Not finding
his own clothes, be put back on those he had found him-
self wearing when he woke up: loose tied trousers and a
shapeless tunic, both bright yellow with small blue spots.
He looked at himself in the mirror. He thought the effect
unfortunate. Was this how they dressed on Urras? He
8

searched in vain for a comb, made do by braiding back
his hair, and so groomed made to leave the roam,.

He could not. The door was locked.

Shevek's first incredulity turned to rage, a kind of rage,
a blind will to violence, which he had never felt before in
his life. He wrenched at the immovable door handle,
slammed his hands against the slick metal of the door, then
turned and jabbed the call button, which the doctor had
told him to use at need. Nothing happened. There were a
lot of other little numbered buttons of different colors on
the intercom panel; he hit his hand across the whole lot
of them. The wall speaker began to babble, "Who the hell
yes coming right away out clear what from twenty-two—•*

Shevek drowned them all out: "Unlock the doorl"

The door slid open, the doctor looked in. At the sight
of his bald, anxious, yellowish face Shevek's wrath cooled
and retreated into an inward darkness. He said, "The door
was locked."

*Tm sorry. Dr. Shevek—a precaution—contagion—«
keeping the others out—"

"To lock out, to lock in, the same act," Shevek said
looking down at the doctor with light, remote eyes.

"Safety—"

"Safety? Must I be kept in a box?**

"The officers* lounge," the doctor offered hurriedly, ap-
peasingly. "Are you hungry, sir? Perhaps you'd like to get
dressed and we'll go to the lounge.**

Shevek looked at the doctor's dothing: tight blue trou-
sers tucked into boots that looked as smooth and fine aa
doth themselves; a violet tunic open down the front and
reclosed with silver frogs; and under that, showing only at,
neck and wrists, a knit shirt of dazzling white.

"I am not dressed?" Shevek inquired at last

"Oh, pajamas will do, by all means. No formalities on a,
freighteri'*

"Pajamas?"

"What you're wearing. Sleeping clothes.**

''Clothes to wear while sleeping?"

"Yes."

Shevek bunked. He made no comment He asked,
"Where are the dothes I wore?"

^our clothes? I had them cleaned—sterilization. I hope
you don't mind, sir—" He investigated a wall panel Shevek,
9

had not discovered and brought out a packet wrapped in
pale-green paper. He unwrapped Shevek's old suit, which
looked very clean and somewhat reduced in size, wadded
up the green paper, activated another panel, tossed the
paper into the bin that opened, and smiled uncertainly,
"There you are, Dr. Shevek."

"What happens to the paper?"

"The paper?"

*The green paper."

**0h, I put it m the trash."

"Trash?"

"Disposal. It gets burned up."

^ou burn paper?"

"Perhaps it just gets dropped out into space, I don't
know. I'm no space medic. Dr. Shevek, I was given the
honor of attending you because of my experience with
other visitors from offworld, the ambassadors from Ter-
ra and from Ham. I run the decontamination and habitua-
tion procedure for all aliens arriving in A-Io. Not that
you're exactly an alien in the same sense, of course." He
looked timidly at Shevek, who could not follow all he
said, but did discern the anxious, diffident, well-meaning
nature beneath the words.

"No," Shevek assured him, "maybe I have the same
grandmother as you, two hundred years ago, on Urras."
He was putting on his old clothes, and as he pulled the shirt
over his head he saw the doctor stuff the blue and yellow
"sleeping clothes" into the "trash" bin. Shevek paused, the
collar still over his nose. He emerged fully, knelt, and
opened the bin. It was empty.

"The clothes are burned?"

"Oh, those are cheap pajamas, service issue—wear *em
and throw 'em away, it costs less than cleaning."

"It costs less," Shevek repeated meditatively. He said the
words the way a paleootologist looks at a fossil, the
fossil that dates a whole stratum.

"I'm afraid your luggage must have got lost in that final
rush for the ship. I hope there was nothing important in it."

"I brought nothing," Shevek said. Though Ins suit had
been bleached almost to white and bad shrunk a bit, it
still fit, and the harsh familiar touch of holum-fiber cloth
was pleasant. He felt like himself again. He sat down on
the bed facing the doctor and said, "You see, I know you
10

dont take things, as we do. In your world, in Urras, one
must buy things. I come to your world, I have no money,
I cannot buy. therefore I should bring. But how much
can I bring? Clothing, yes, I might bring two suits. But
food? How can I bring food enough? I cannot bring, I
cannot buy. If I am to be kept alive, you must give it to
roe. I am an Anarresti, I make the Urrasti behave like
Anarresti: to give. not to seIL If you like. Of course, it is
not necessary to keep me alive! I am the Beggarman, you
see."

*'0t, not at all, sir, no, no. You're a very honored guest
Please don't judge us by the crew of this ship, they're
very ignorant, limited men—you have no idea of the wel-
come youll get on Urras. After an you're a world-famous
—a galactically famous scientist! And our first visitor from
Anarres! I assure you, things will be very different when
we come into Peier Field."

'I do not doubt they will be different," Shevek said.

The Moon Run normally took four and a half days each
way, but this time five days of habituation time for the
passenger were added to the return trip. Shevek and Dr.
Kimoe spent them in vaccinations and conversations. The
captain of the Mindful spent them in maintaining orbit
around Urras. and swearing. When he tad to speak to
Shevefc, he did so with uneasy disrespect. The doctor, who
was ready to explain everything, had his analysis ready:

"He's used to looking on all foreigners as inferior, as less
than fully human."

The creation of pseudo-species, Odo called it Yes. I
thought that perhaps on Urraa people no longer thought
that way. since you have there so many languages and
nations, and even visitors from other solar systems."

"Very few of those, since interstellar travel is so costiy
and so slow. Perhaps it won't always be so," Dr. Kimoe
added, evidently with an intent to flatter Shevek or to draw
him ouf which Shevek ignored.

"The Second Officer,'* he said, "seems to be afraid of
me."

**0h, with him it's religious bigotry. He's a strict-inter-
pretation EpiphanisL Recites the Primes every night. A
totally rigid mind.**

"So he sees me—how?"

11

"As a dangerous atheist"

"An atheist! Why?"

"Why, because you're an Odonian from Anarres—
there's no religion on Anarres.*'                -

"No religion? Are we stones, on Anarres?"

"I mean established religion—churches, creeds—" Ki-
moe flustered easily. He had the physician's brisk self-as-
surance, but Shevek continually upset it. All his explana-
tions ended up, after two or three of Shevek's questions,
in floundering. Each took for granted certain relationships
that the other could not even see. For instance, this curious
matter of superiority and inferiority. Shevek knew that the
concept of superiority, of relative height, was important to
the Urrasti; they often used the word "higher*' as a syno-
nym for "better" in their writings, where an Anarresti
would use "more central." But what did being higher have
to do with being foreign? It was one puzzle among hun-
dreds.

"I see," he said now, another puzzle coming dear. **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."

"Well, these days any enlightened person would ad-
mit—"

"The vocabulary makes it difficult," Shevek said, pursu-         '';

ing his discovery. "In Pravic the word religion is seldom.         ,^
No, what do you say—rare. Not often used. Of course, it         f
is one of the Categories: the Fourth Mode. Few people         ^
leam to practice all the Modes. But the Modes are built         w
of the natural capacities of the mind, you could not seri-         |,
ously believe that we had no religious capacity? That we         ||
could do physics while we were cut off from the profound-         ^
est relationship man has with the cosmos?"                        |

"Oh, no, not at all—"                                      ^

"That would be to make a pseudo-species of us indeed P*         f'

"Educated men certainly would understand that, these         f1
officers are ignorant"                                          §

"But is it only bigots, then, who are allowed to go out         f^
Into the cosmos?"                                              ^

All their conversations were like this, exhausting to the         if'
doctor and unsatisfying to Shevek, yet intensely interest-         3>
ing to both. They were Shevek's only means of exploring
the new world that awaited him. The ship itself, and
12

Kimoe's mind. were his microcosm. There were no books
aboard the Mindful, the officers avoided Shevek, and the
crewmen were kept strictly out of his way. As for the doc-
tor's mind, though intelligent and certainly well-meaning.
it was a jumble of intellectual artifacts even more con-
fusing than all the gadgets, appliances, and conveniences
that filled the ship. These latter Shevek found entertain-
ing; everything was so lavish, stylish, and inventive; but
the furniture of Kimoe's intellect he did not find so com-
fortable. 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 un-
aware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind
them. Only once did Shevek see them breached, in all
their days of conversation between the worlds.

He had asked why there were no women on the ship,
and Kimoe had replied that running a space freighter was
not women's work. History courses and his knowledge of
Odo's writings gave Shevek a context in which to under-
stand this tautological answer, and he said no more. But
the doctor asked a question in return, a question about
Anarres. "Is it true. Dr. Shevek, that women in your so-
ciety are treated exactly like men?"

"That would be a waste of good equipment,** said She-
vek with a laugh, and then a second laugh as the full ridi-
culousness of the idea grew upon him.

The doctor hesitated, evidently picking his way around
one of the obstacles in his mind, then looked flustered, and
said, "Oh, no, I didn't mean sexually—obviously you—
they ... I meant in the matter of their social status."

"Status is the same as class?"

Kimoe tried to explain status, failed, and went back to
the first topic. "Is there really no distinction between
men's work and women's work?"

"Well, no. it seems a very mechanical basis for the di-
vision of labor, doesn't it? A person chooses work accord-
ing to interest, talent, strength—what has the sex to do
with that?"

"Men are physically stronger," the doctor asserted with
professional finality.

"Yes, often, and larger, but what does that matter when
we have machines? And even when we don't have ma-
13

chines, when we must dig with the shovel or cany on the
back, the men maybe work faster—the big ones—but the
women work longer. . . . Often I have wished I was as
tough as a woman."

Kimoe stared at him, shocked out of politeness. **But
the loss of—of everything feminin&—of delicacy—and
the loss of masculine self-respect— You cant pretend,
surely, in your work, that women are your equals? In
physics, in mathematics, in the intellect? You cant pre-
tend to lower yourself constantly to their level?"

Shevek sat in the cushioned, comfortable chair and
looked around the officers' lounge. On the viewscreen the
brilliant curve of Urras hung still against black space, like
a blue-green opal. That lovely sight, and the lounge, had
become familiar to Shevek these last days, but now the
bright colors, the curvilinear chairs, the hidden lighting,
the game tables and television screens and soft carpeting,
all of it seemed as alien as it bad the first time he saw it

*'I don't think I pretend very much, Kimoe," he said.

"Of course, I have known highly intelligent women,
women who could think Just like a man," the doctor said,
hurriedly, aware that he had been almost shouting—that
be had, Shevek thought, been pounding his hands against
the locked door and shouting....

Shevek turned the conversation, but he went on think-
ing about it. 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 writ-
ings that two hundred years ago the main Urrasti sexual
institutions had been "marriage," a partnership authorized
and enforced by legal and economic sanctions, and "pros-
titution," which seemed merely to be a wider term, copu-
lation 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 Urras-
ti, he had better find out

It was strange that even sex, the source of so much
solace, delight, and joy for so many years, could overnight
become an unknown territory where he must tread care-
14

fully and know his ignorance; yet it was so. He was warned
not only by Kimoe's queer burst of scorn and anger, but
by a previously vague impression which that episode
brought into focus. When first aboard the ship, in those
long hours of fever and despair, he had been distracted,
sometimes pleased and sometimes irritated, by a grossly
simple sensation: the softness of the bed. Though only a
bunk, its mattress gave under his weight with caressing sup-
pleness. It yielded to him, yielded so insistently that bs
was, still, always conscious of it while falling asleep. Both
the pleasure and the irritation it produced in him were de-
cidedly erotic. There was also the hot-air-nozzle-towel de-
vice: the same kind of effect A tickling. And the design
of the furniture in the officers' lounge, the smooth plastic
curves into which stubborn wood and steel had been
forced, the smoothness and delicacy of surfaces and
textures: were these not also faintly, pervasively erotic?
He knew himself well enough to be sure that a few days
without Takver, even under great stress, should not get
him so worked up that he felt a woman in every table top.
Not unless the woman was really there.

Were Urrasti cabinetmakers all celibate?

He gave it up; he would find out, soon enough, on'
Urras.

Just before they strapped in for descent the doctor camel
to his cabin to check the progress of the various immuni-
zations, the last of which, a plague inoculation, had madel
Shevek sick and groggy. Kimoe gave him a new pilL
•That'll pep you up tor the landing," he said. Stoic, Shevek
swallowed the thing. The doctor fussed with his medical
kit and suddenly began to speak very fast: "Dr. Shevek, I
dont expect m be allowed to attend you again, though
perhaps, but if not I wanted to tell you that it, that I, that
it has been a great privilege to me. Not because—but be-
cause I have come to respect—to appreciate—that simply
as a human being, your kindness, real kindness—"

No more adequate response occurring to Shevek
through his headache, he reached out and took Kimoe's
hand, saying, "Then let's meet again, brother!" Kimoe gave
his hand a nervous shake, Urrasti style, and hurried out
After he was gone Shevek realized he had spoken to him in
Pravic, called him ammar, brother, in a language Kimoe
did not understand.

15

The wall speaker was Matting orders. Strapped into the
bunk, Shevek listened, feeling hazy and detached. The sen-
sations of entry thickened the haze; he was conscious of
little but a profound hope he would not have to vomit He
did not know they had landed tin Kimoe came hurrying in
again and rushed him out to the officers' lounge. The
viewscreen where Urras had hung cloud-coiled and lumi-
nous so long was blank. The room was full of people.
Where had they all come from? He was surprised and
pleased by his ability to stand up, walk, and shake hands.
He concentrated on that much, and let meaning pass him
by. Voices, smiles, hands, words, names. His name again
and again: Dr. Shevek, Dr. Shevek. . . . Now he and all
the strangers arouad him were going down a covered
ramp, all the voices very loud, words echoing off the walls.
The clatter of voices thinned. A strange air touched his
face.

He looked up, and as he stepped off the ramp onto the
level ground he stumbled and nearly fell. He thought of
death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its
completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new-
earth.

A broad, grey evening was around him. Blue lights,
mist-blurred, burned far away across a foggy field. The
air on his face and hands, in his nostrils and throat
and lungs, was cool, damp, many-scented, mild. It was
not strange. It was the air of the world from which his
race had come, it was the air of home.

Someone had taken his arm when he stumbled. Lights
flashed on him. Photographers were filming the scene for
the news: The First Man from the Moon: a tall, frail fig-
ure in a crowd of dignitaries and professors and security
agents, the fine shaggy head held very erect (so that
the photographers could catch every feature) as if he
were trying to look above the floodlights into the sky. the
broad sky of fog that hid the stars, the Moon, all other
worlds. Journalists tried to crowd through the rings of
policemen: "Will you give us a statement. Dr. Shevek, in
this historic moment?" They were forced back again at
once. The men around him urged him forward. He was
borne off to the waiting limousine, eminently photograph-
able to the last because of his height, his long hair, and the
strange look of grief and recognition on his face.
16

The towers of the city went up into mist, great ladders
of blurred light. Trains passed overhead, bright shrieking
streaks. Massive walls of stone and glass fronted the
streets above the race of cars and trolleys. Stone, steel,
glass, electric light No faces.

"This is ?0 Esseia, Dr. Shevek. But it was decided it
would be better to keep you out of the city crowds just at
first. We're going straight on to the University."

There were five men with him in the dark, softly padded
body of the car. They pointed out landmarks, but in the
fog he could not tell which great vague, fleeting building
was the High Court and which the National Museum,
which the Directorate and which the Senate. They crossed
a river or estuary; the million lights of Nio Esseia, fog-
diffused, trembled on dark water, behind them. The road
darkened, the fog thickened, the driver slowed the vehicle's
pace. Its lights shone on the mist ahead as if on a wall that
kept retreating before them. Shevek sat leaning forward a
little, gazing out. His eyes were not focused, nor was his
mind, but he looked aloof and grave, and the other men
talked quietly, respecting his silence.

What was the thicker darkness that flowed along end-
lessly by the road? Trees? Could they have been driving,
ever since they left the city, among trees? The lotic word
came into his mind: "forest" They would not come out
suddenly into the desert. The trees went on and on, on the
next hillside and the next and the next standing in the
bweet chul of the fog, endless, a forest all over the world,
a still striving interplay of lives, a dark movement of
leaves in the night Then as Shevek sat marveling as the
car came up out of the fog of the river valley into clearer
air, there looked at him from the darkness under the road-
bide foliage, for one instant, a face.

It was not like any human face. It was as long as his
arm. and ghastly white. Breath jetted in vapor from what
must be nostrils, and terrible, unmistakable, there was an
eye. A large, dark eye, mournful, perhpas cynical? gone
in the flash of the car's lights.

"What was that?"

-Donkey, wasn't it?"

"An animal?"

"Yes, an animal. By God, that's right! You have no
large animals on Anarres, have you?"
17

"A donkey's a kind of horse." said another of the men,
and another, in a firm, elderly voice, 'That was a horse.
Donkeys don't come that size." They wanted to talk with
him, but Shevek was not listening again. He was thinking
of Takver. He wondered what that deep, dry, dark gaze
out of the darkness would have meant to Takver. She had
always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her
kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seek-
ing the experience of existences outside the human bound-
ary. Takver would have known how to look back at that
eye in the darkness under the trees.

"There's leu Eun ahead. There's quite a crowd waiting
to meet you. Dr. Shevek; the President, and several Di-
rectors, and the Chancellor, of course, all kinds of bigwigs.
But if you're tired we'll get the amenities over with as soon
as possible."

The amenities lasted several hours. He never could re-
member them clearly afterward. He was propelled from
the small dark box of the car into a huge bright box full of
people—hundreds of people, under a golden ceiling hung
with crystal lights. He was introduced to all the people.
They were all shorter than he was, and bald. The few

•women there were bald even on their heads; he realized
'at last that they must shave off all their hair, the very fine,
soft, short body hair of his race, and the head hair as

•well. But they replaced it with marvelous clothing, gor-
geous in cut and color, the women in full gowns that swept
the floor, their breasts bare, their waists and necks and
heads adorned with jewelry and lace and gauze, the men
jn trousers and coats or tunics of red, blue, violet, gold,
green, with slashed sleeves and cascades of lace, or long
gowns of crimson or dark green or black that parted at the
knee to show the white stockings, silver-gartered. An-
other lotic word floated into Shevek's head, one he had
never had a referent for, though he liked the sound of it:

"'splendor." These people had splendor. Speeches were
made. The President of the Senate of the Nation of A-Io,
a man with strange, cold eyes, proposed a toast: "To the
hew era of brotherhood between the Twin Planets, and
to the harbinger of that new era, our distinguished and
most welcome guest. Dr. Shevek of Anarres!" The Chan-
cellor of the University talked to him charmingly, the First
Director of the nation talked to him seriously, he was in-

18

troduced to ambassadors, astronauts, physicists, politi-
cians, dozens of people, all of whom had long titles and
honorifics both before and after their names, and they
talked to him, and he answered them, but he had no
memory later of what anyone had said, least of all himself.
Very late at night he found himself with a small group of
men walking in the warm rain across a large park or
Square. There was the springy feeling of live grass under-
foot; he recognized it from having walked in the Tri-
angle Park in Abbenay. That vivid memory and the cool
vast touch of the night wind awakened him. His soul came
out of hiding.

His escorts took him into a building and to a room
which, they explained, was "his."

It was large, about ten meters long, and evidently a
common room, as there were no divisions or sleeping
platforms; the three men still with him must be his room-
mates. It was a very beautiful common room, with one
whole wall a series of windows, each divided by a slender
column that rose treelike to form a double arch at the top.
The floor was carpeted with crimson, and at the far end
of the room a fire burned in an open hearth. Shevek
crossed the room and stood in front of the fire. He had
never seen wood burned for warmth, but he was beyond
wonder. He held out his hands to the pleasant heat, and
eat down on a seat of polished marble by the hearth.

The youngest of the men who had come with him sat
down across the hearth from him. The other two were
etill talking. They were talking physics, but Shevek did not
try to follow what they said. The young man spoke quietly.
"I wonder bow you must feel. Dr. Shevek."

Shevek stretched out his legs and leaned forward to
catch the warmth of the fire on his face. "I feel heavy."

"Heavy?"

"Perhaps the gravity. Or I am tired.'*

He looked at the other man, but through the hearth glow
the face was not clear, only the glint of a gold chain and
the deep jewel red of the robe.

"I don't know your name.'*

"Saio Pae."

"Oh, Pae, yes. I know your articles on Paradox."

He spoke heavily, dreamily.

"There'll be a bar here, Senior Faculty rooms always
19

have a liquor cabinet. Would you care for something to
drink?"

"Water, yes."

The young man reappeared with a glass of water as
the other two came to join them at the hearth, Shevek
drank off the water thirstily and sat looking down at the
glass in his hand, a fragile, finely shaped piece that caught
the gleam of the fire on its rim of gold. He was aware
of the three men, of their attitudes as they sat or stood
near him, protective, respectful, proprietary.

He looked up at them, one face after the other. They
all looked at him, expectant "Well, you have me," he said.
He smiled. '"You have your anarchist. What are you going
to do with him?"

20

Chapter 2




In a square window in a white wall is the clear, bare sky.
In the center of the sky is the sun.

There are eleven babies in the room, most of them
cooped up in large, padded pen-cots in pairs or trios, and
settling down, with commotion and elocution, into their
naps. The two eldest remain at large, a fat active one
dismembering a pegboard and a knobby one sitting in
the square of yellow sunlight from the window, staring up
the sunbeam with an earnest and stupid expression.

In the anteroom the matron, a one-eyed woman with
grey hair, confers with a tall, sad-looking man of thirty.
**The mother's been posted to Abbenay," the man says.
"She wants him to stay here."

"Shall we take him into the nursery full-time, then. Pa-
lat?"

'^Yes. 1*11 be moving back into a dorm."

"Don't worry, he knows us all here! But surely Divlab
will send you along after Rulag soon? Since you're part-
ners, and both engineers?"

"Yes, but she's . . . It's the Central Institute of Engi-
neering that wants her, see. I'm not that good. Rulag
has a great work to do."

21

The matron nodded, and sighed. "Even so—1" she said
with energy, and did not say anything else.

The father's gaze was on the knobby infant, who had
not noticed his presence in the anteroom, being preoccu-
pied with light. The fat infant was at this moment coming
towards the knobby one rapidly, though with a peculiar
squatting gait caused by a damp and sagging diaper. He
approached out of boredom or sociability, but once in the
square of sunlight he discovered it was warm there. He
gat down heavily beside the knobby one, crowding him into
the shade.

The knobby one's blank rapture gave place at once to a
scowl of rage. He pushed the fat one, shouting, "Go "way!"

The matron was there at once. She righted the fat one.
"Shev, you arent to push other people."

The knobby baby stood up. His face was a glare of sun-
light and anger. His diapers were about to fall off. "Minel"
he said in a high, ringing voice. "Mine sunt"

"It is not yours," the one-eyed woman said with the
mildness of utter certainty. "Nothing is yours. It is to use.
It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it."
And she picked the knobby baby up with gentle inexorable
hands and set him aside, out of the square of sunlight.

The fat baby sat staring, indifferent. The knobby one
shook all over, screamed, "Mine suni" and burst into teara
of rage.

The father picked him up and held him. "There, now*
Shev," he said. "Come on, you know you can't have things.
What's wrong with you?" His voice was soft, and shook as
if he also was not far from tears. The thin, long, light
child in his arms wept passionately.

"There are some just cant take life easy," the one-eyed
woman said, watching with sympathy.

"m take him for a dom visit now. The mother's leaving
tonight, you see."

"Go on. I hope you get posted together soon," said
the matron, hoisting the fat child like a sack of grain onto
her hip, her face melancholy and her good eye squinting.
"Byebye, Shev, little heart Tomorrow, listen, tomorrow
we'll play truck-and-driver."

The baby did not forgive her yet He sobbed, clutching
his father's neck, and hid his face in the darkness of the
lost sun.

22

The Orchestra needed all the benches that morning for
rehearsal, and the dance group was thumping around in
the big room of the learning center, so the kids who were
working on Speaking-and-Listening sat in a circle on the
foamstone floor of the workshop. The first volunteer, a
lanky eight-year-old with long hands and feet, stood up.
He stood very erect, as healthy children do; his slightly
fuzzy face was pale at first, then turned red as he waited
for the other children to listen. "Go on, Shevek," the
group director said.

"Well, I had an idea."

"Louder," said the director, a heavy-set man in his
early twenties.

The boy smiled with embarrassment. "Well, see, I was
thinking, let's say you throw a rock at something. At a
tree. You throw it, and it goes through the air and bits
the tree. Right? But it can't. Because—can 1 have the
slate? Look, here's you throwing the rock, and here's the
tree," he scribbled on the slate, "that's supposed to be a
tree, and here's the rock. see, halfway in between." The
children giggled at his portrayal of a holum tree, and he
smiled. "To get from you to the tree, the rock has to be
halfway in between you and the tree, doesn't it. And
then it has to be halfway between halfway and the tree.
And then it has to be halfway between that and the tree.
It doesn't matter how far it's gone, there's always a place,
only it's a time really, that's halfway between the last
place it was and the tree—"

"Do you think this is interesting?" the director inter-
rupted, speaking to the other children.

"Why can't it reach the tree?" said a girl of ten.

"Because it always has to go half of the way that's left
to go," said Shevek, "and there's always half of the way
left to go—seer'

"Shall we just say you aimed the rock badly?" the di-
rector said with a tight smile.

"It doesn't matter how you aim it It can't reach the
tree."

"Who told you this idea?"

"Nobody. I sort of saw it. I think I see how the
rock actually does—"

"That's enough."

Some of the other children had been talking, but they
23

stopped as if struck dumb. The little boy with the slate
stood there in the silence. He looked frightened, and
scowled.

"Speech is sharing—a cooperative art. You're not shar-
ing, merely egoizing."

The thin, vigorous harmonies of the orchestra sounded
down the halL

"You didn't see that for yourself, it wasn't spontaneous.
I've read something very like it in a book."

Shevek stared at the director. ''What book? Is there
one here?"

The director stood up. He was about twice as tall and
three times as heavy as his opponent, and it was clear in
his face that he disliked the child intensely; but there was
no threat of physical violence in his stance, only an asser-
tion of authority, a little weakened by his irritable
response to the child's odd question. "Nol And stop
egoizing!" Then he resumed his melodious pedantic tone:

"This kind of thing is really directly contrary to what
we're after in a Speaking-and-Listening group. Speech is
a two-way function. Shevek isnt ready to understand
that yet, as most of you are, and so his presence is dis-
ruptive to the group. You feel that yourself, dont you,
Shevek? I'd suggest that you find another group working
on your level."

Nobody else said anything. The silence and the loud
thin music went on while the boy handed back the slate
and made his way out of the circle. He went off into the
corridor and stood there. The group he had left began,
under the director's guidance, a group story, taking turns.
Shevek listened to their subdued voices and to his heart
still beating fast There was a singing in his ears which
was not the orchestra but the noise that came when you
kept yourself from crying; he had observed this singing
noise several times before. He did not like listening to it,
and he did not want to think about the rock and the tree,
so he turned his mind to the Square. It was made of
numbers, and numbers were always cool and solid; when he
was at fault he could turn to them, for they had no fault.
He had seen the Square in his mind a while ago, a design
fn space like the designs music made in time: a square of
the first nine integers with 5 in the center. However you
added up the rows they came out the same, all inequality
24

balanced out; it was pleasant to look at If only he
could make a group that liked to talk about things like
that; but there were only a couple of the older boys and
girls who did, and they were busy. What about the book
the director had spoken of? Would it be a book of num-
bers? Would it show how the rock got to the tree? He had
been stupid to tell the joke about the rock and the tree,
nobody else even saw it was a joke, the director was
right. His head ached. He looked inward, inward to the
calm patterns.

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true.
It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out
quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together,
Instead of staying straight and fitting together. But under-
neath the words, at the center, like the center of the
Square, it all came out even. Everything could change,
yet nothing would be lost. K you saw the numbers you
could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foun-
dations of the world. And they were solid.

Shevek had learned how to wait. He was good at it, an
expert He had first learned the skill waiting for his mother
Rulag to come back, though that was so long ago he
didn't remember it; and he had perfected it waiting for his
turn, waiting to share, waiting for a share. At the age
of eight he asked why and bow and what if, but he seldom
asked when.

He waited till his father came to take him for a dom
visit It was a long wait: six decads. Palat had taken a
short posting in maintenance in the Water Reclamation
Plant in Drum Mountain, and after that he was going to
take a decad at the beach in Malennin, where he would
swim, and rest, and copulate with a woman named Pipar.
He had explained all this to his son. Shevek trusted him,
and he deserved trust At the end of sixty days he came by
the children's dormitories in Wide Plains, a long, thin
man with a sadder look than ever. Copulating was not
really what he wanted. Rulag was. When he saw the boy,
he smiled and his forehead wrinkled in pain.

They took pleasure in each other's company.

"Palaf did you ever see any books with all numbers in
them?"

"What do you mean, mathematics?"

"I guess so."

25

•Xike this?"
Palat took from his overtunic pocket a book. It was

small, meant to be carried in a pocket, and like most
books was bound in green with the Circle of Life stamped
on the cover. It was printed very full, with small characters
and narrow margins, because paper is a substance
that takes a lot of holum trees and a lot of human labor
to make, as the supplies dispenser at the learning center
always remarked when you botched a page and went to get
a new one. Palat held the book out open to Shevek. The
double page was a series of columns of numbers. There
they were, as he had imagined them. Into his hands he
received the covenant of eternal justice. Logarithmic
Tables, Bases 10 and 12* said the title on the cover above

the Circle of Life.
The little boy studied the first page for some while.

*tWhat are they for?*' he asked, for evidently these pat>-
terns were presented not only for their beauty. The engi-
neer, sitting on a hard couch beside him in the cold, poorly
lit common room of the domicile, undertook to explain
logarithms to him. Two old men at the other end of the
room cackled over their game of "Top 'Em." An adoles-
cent couple came in and asked if the single room was free
tonight and went off to it. Rain hit hard on the metal roof-
ing of the one-storey domicile, and ceased. It never rained
for long. Palat got out his slide rule and showed Shevefc
its operation; in return Shevek showed him the Square
and the principle of its arrangement. It was very late
when they realized it was late. They ran through the
marvelously rain-scented, muddy dark to the children's
dormitory, and got a perfunctory scolding from the vigil-
keeper. They kissed quickly, both shaking with laughter,
and Shevek ran to the big sleeping room, to the window,
from which he could see his father going back down the
single street of Wide Plains in the wet, electric dark.

The boy went to bed muddy-legged, and dreamed. Ha
dreamed he was on a road through a bare land. Far ahead
across the road he saw a line. As he approached it across
the plain he saw that it was a wall. It went from horizon
to horizon across the barren land. It was dense, dark, and
very high. The road ran up to it and was stopped.

He must go on, and he could not go on. The wall
stopped him. A painful, angry fear rose up in him. He had
26

»' . ',•
»

»  •••    ••

ii^'
i -^

g-i-

»'••;•
'<•

Ir

to go on or he could never come home again. But the wan
stood there. There was no way.

He beat at the smooth surface with his hands and
yelled at it His voice came out wordless and cawing.
Frightened by the sound of it he cowered down, and
then he heard another voice saying, "Look." It was his1
father's voice. He had an idea his mother Rulag was mere
too, though he did not see her (he had no memory of her
face). It seemed to him that she and Palat were both oa
all fours in the darkness under the wall, and that they
were bulkier than human beings and shaped differently.
They were pointing, showing him something there on thef
ground, the sour dirt where nothing grew. A stone lay
there. It was dark like the wall, but on it, or inside it,
there was a number; a 5 he thought at first, then took it
for 1, then understood what it was—the primal number^
that was both unity and plurality. That is the corner-
stone," said a voice of dear familiarity, and Shevek was
pierced through with joy. There was no wall in the shad-"
ows, and be knew that he had come back, that he waai
home.

Later he could not recall the details of this dream, but
that rush of piercing joy he did not forget. He had never
known anything like ft; so certain was its assurance of
permanence, like one glimpse of a light that shines steadi-
ly, that he never thought of it as unreal though it had
been experienced in dream. Only, however reliably ther^
he could not reattain it either by longing for it or by tfaa
act of wffl. He could only remember ft, waking. When hd
dreamed of the wall again, as he sometimes did, ther
dreams were sullen and without resolution.

They had picked up the idea of "prisons" from episode?
in the Life of Odo. which all of them who had elected
to work on History were reading. There were many ob^
scurities in the book, and Wide Plains had nobody who
knew enough history to explain them; but by the time
they got to Odo's years in the Fort in Drio, the concept
"prison** had become self-explanatory. And when a circuif
history teacher came through the town he expounded the
subject, with the reluctance of a decent adult forced to
explain an obscenity to children. Yes, he said, a prison was:

a place where a State put people who disobeyed its Laws.
27

But why didnt they just leave the place? They couldn't
leave, the doors were locked. Locked? Like the doors on a
moving truck, so you don't fall out, stupid! But what did
they do inside one room all the time? Nothing. Thera
was nothing to do. You've seen pictures of Odo in the
prison cell in Drio, haven't you? Image of defiant patience,
bowed grey head, clenched hands, motionless in encroach-
ing shadows. Sometimes prisoners were sentenced to
work. Sentenced? Well, that means a judge, a person given
power by the Law, ordered them to do some kind of physi-
cal labor. Ordered them? What if they didn't want to do it?
Well. they were forced to do it; if they didnt work, they
were beaten. A thrill of tension went through the children
listening, eleven- and twelve-year-olds, none of whom had
ever been struck, or seen any person struck, except in.

immediate personal anger*
Tula asked the question that was in all their minds:

**You mean, a lot of people would beat up one person?"

*T^es."

**Why didnt the others stop them?"

"The guards had weapons. The prisoners did not," the
teacher said. He spoke with the violence of one forced.
to say the detestable, and embarrassed by it.

The simple lure of perversity brought Tirin. Shevek.
and three other boys together. Girls were eliminated
from their company, they could not have said why. Tirin
had found an ideal prison, under the west wing of the
learning center. It was a space just big enough to hold
one person sitting or lying down, formed by three COD)-
crete foundation walls and the underside of the floor above;

the foundations being part of a concrete form, the floor of
it was continuous with the walls, and a heavy slab of
foamstone siding would dose it ofE completely. But the
door had to be locked. Experimenting, they found that
two props wedged between a facing wall and the slab
shut it with awesome finality. Nobody inside could get
that door open.

*'What about light?"

"'No light," Tirin said. He spoke with authority about
things like this, because his imagination put him straight
into them. What facts he had, he used, but it was not fact
that lent him his certainty. *They let prisoners sit in the
dark, in the Fort in Drio. For years."
28

"Air, though," Shevefc said. "That door fits like a vac-
uum coupling. It's got to have a hole in it"

"It'll take hours to bore through foamstone. Anyhow,
who's going to stay in that box long enough to run out of
airl"

Chorus of volunteers and claimants,

Tirin looked at them, derisive. "You're an crazy. Who
wants to actually get locked into a place like that? What
for?" Making the prison had been his idea, and it sufficed
him; he never realized that imagination does not suffice
some people, they must get into the cell, they must try
to open the unopenable door.

"I want to see what it's like," said Kadagv, a broad-
chested, serious, domineering twelve-year-old.

"Use your head!" Tirin jeered, but the others backed
Kadagv. Shevek got a drill from the workshop, and they
bored a two-centimeter hole through the "door" at nose
height. It took nearly an hour, as Tirin had predicted.

"How long you want to stay in, Kad? An hour?"

"Look," Kadagv said, "if Tm the prisoner, I cant de-
cide. I'm not free. You have to decide when to let me
out-

*That*s right," said Shevek. unnerved by this logic.

''You can't stay in too long, Kad. I want a turni" said
the youngest of them, Gibesh. The prisoner deigned no
reply. He entered the cell. The door was raised and set in
place with a bang, and the props wedged against it, all
four jailers hammering them into place with enthusiasm.
They all crowded to the air hole to see their prisoner, but
since there was no light inside the prison except from the
air hole, they saw nothing.

"Don't suck all the poor fart*s air out!"

"Blow him in some."

"Fart him in somel"

"How longll we give him?"

"An hour."

"Three minutes.**

"Five years!"

"It's four hours tin lights-out. That ought to do if

"But I want a turni"

"All right, weTl leave you in aU night"

"Well, I meant tomorrow."

Four hours later they knocked the props away and
29

leased Kadagv. He emerged as a dominant of the
situation as when he had entered, and said he was hungry,
and it was nothing; he'd just slept mostly.

"Would you do it again?" Tirin challenged him.

-Sure."

"No, I want second turn—w

"Shut up. Gib. Now, Kad? Would you walk right back
hi there now, without knowing when we'll let you out?"

"Sure."

"Without food?*'

^ey fed prisoners," Shevek said. *That*s what's so
weird about the whole thing."

Kadagv shrugged. His attitude of lofty endurance was
intolerable.

"Look," Shevek said to the two youngest boys, "go
ask at the kitchen for leftovers, and pick up a bottle or
something full of water, too." He turned to Kadagv. "Well
give you a whole sack of stuff, so you can stay in that
hole as long as you like."

"As long as you. like," Kadagv corrected.

"All right Get in therel" Kadagv's self-assurance
brought out Tirin's satirical, play-acting vein. "You're a
prisoner. You don't talk back. Understand? Turn around.
Put your hands on your head."

"What for?"

"You want to quit?"

Kadagv faced him sullenly.

"You can't ask why. Because if you do we can beat
you, and you have to Just take it, and nobody will help
you. Because we can kick you in the balls and you cant
kick back. Because you are not free. Now, do you want to
go through with it?*'

"Sure. Hit me."

Tirin, Shevek, and the prisoner stood facing one an-
other in a strange, stiff group around the lantern, in the
darkness, among the heavy foundation walls of the build-
ing.

Tirin smiled arrogantly, luxuriously. "Don't tell me

•what to do, you profiteer. Shut up and get into that cell!"
And as Kadagv turned to obey, Tirin pushed him straight-

•arm in the back so that he fell sprawling. He gave a
sharp grunt of surprise or pain, and sat up nursing a
finger that had been scraped or sprained against the back
30

wall of the celL Shevek and Tirin did not speak. They
stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their
role as guards. They were not playing the role now, it
was playing them. The younger boys returned with some
holum bread, a melon, and a bottle of water. They were
talking as they came, but the curious silence at the cell
got into them at once. The food and water was shoved in,
the door raised and braced. Kadagv was alone in the dark.
The others gathered around the lantern. Gibesh whispered,
•'Where'U he piss?"

"In his bed," Tirin replied with sardonic clarity.

"What if he has to crap?" Gibesh asked, and suddenly
went off into a peal of high laughter.

"What's so funny about crapping?"

"I thought—what if he cant see—in the dark—" Gib-
esh could not explain his humorous fancy fully. They all
began to laugh without explanation, whooping till they
were breathless. All were aware that the boy locked inside
the cell could hear them laughing.

It was past lights-out in the children's dormitory, and
many adults were already in bed, though lights were on
here and there in the domiciles. The street was empty.
The boys careened down it laughing and calling to one
another, wild with the pleasure of sharing a secret, of
disturbing others, of compounding wickednesses. They
woke up half the children in the dormitory with games of
tag down the halls and among the beds. No adult inter-
fered; the tumult died down presently.

Tirin and Shevek sat up whispering together for a long
time on Tirin's bed. They decided that Kadagv had asked
for it, and would get two full nights in prison.

Their group met in the afternoon at the lumber recy-
cling workshop, and the foreman asked where Kadagv
was. Sbevek exchanged a glance with Tirin. He felt clever.
he felt a sense of power, in not replying. Yet when Tirin
replied coolly that he must have joined another group for
the day, Shevek was shocked by the lie. His sense of secret
power suddenly made him uncomfortable: his legs itched,
his ears felt hot. When the foreman spoke to him he
jumped with alarm, or fear, or some such feeling, a
feeling he had never had before, something like embar-
rassment but worse than that: inward, and vile. He kept
thinking about Kadagv, as he plugged and sanded nail
31

holes in three-ply hohim boards and sanded the boards
back to silky smoothness- Every time he looked into his
mind there was Kadagv in it It was disgusting.

Gibesh, who had been standing guard duty, came to
Tirin and Shevek after dinner, looking uneasy. "I thought
1 heard Kad saying something in there. In a sort of funny

voice."

There was a pause. 'Well let him out,** Shevek said.

Tirin turned on him. "Come on, Shev, don't go mushy
on us. Don't get altruistici Let him finish it out and respect
himself at the end of it**

**Altruistic, hell. I want to respect myself,** Shevek said,
and set off for the learning center. Tirin knew him; he
wasted no more time arguing with him, but followed. The
eleven-year-olds trailed along behind. They crawled under
the building to the cell. Shevek knocked one wedge free,
Tirin the other. The door of the prison fell outward with a
flat thump.

Kadagv was lying on the ground, curled up on his side.
He sat up, then got up very slowly and came out. He
stooped more than necessary under the low roof, and
blinked a lot in the light of the lantern, but looked no dif-
ferent from usual. The smell that came out with him was
unbelievable. He had suffered, from whatever cause, from
diarrhea. There was a mess in the cell, and smears of
yellow fecal stuff on his shirt When he saw this in the
lantern light he made an effort to hide it with his hand,
Nobody said anything much.

When they had crawled out from under the building
and were heading around to the dormitory, Kadagv asked,
"How long was it?"

"About thirty hours, counting the first four."

"Pretty long," Kadagv said without conviction.

After getting him to the baths to clean up, Shevek went
off at a run to the latrine. There he leaned over a bowl
and vomited. The spasms did not leave him for a quarter
of an hour. He was shaky and exhausted when they passed.
He went to the dormitory common room, read some
physics, and went to bed early. None of the five boys
ever went back to the prison under the learning center.
None of them ever mentioned the episode, except Gibesh.
who boasted about it once to some older boys and girls;

but they did not understand, and he dropped the subject
32

The Moon stood high over the Northsetting Regional
Institute of the Noble and Material Sciences. Four boys of
fifteen or sixteen sat on a hilltop between patches of
scratchy ground-holum and looked down at the Regional
Institute and up at the Moon.

"Peculiar," said Tirin. "I never thought before.. .*'

Comments from the other three on the self-evidence of
this remark.

"I never thought before," said Tirin unruffled, "of the
fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on
Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, 'Look, there's
the Moon.' Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their
earth."

"Where, then, is Truth?" declaimed Bedap, and yawned.

"In the hill one happens to be sitting on," said Tirin.

They all went on staring up at the brilliant, blurry tur-
quoise, which was not quite round, a day past its full. The
northern ice cap was dazzling. "It's clear in the north,**
Shevek said. "Sunny. That's A-Io, that brownish bulge
there."

"They're all lying around naked in the sun," said Kvetur,
"with Jewels in their navels, and no hair."

There was a silence.

They had come up to the hilltop for masculine company.
The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It
seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls.
Everywhere they looked, waking or asleep, they saw giris.
They had all tried copulating with girls; some of them in
despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no
difference. The girls were there.

Three days ago in a class on the History of the Odonian
Movement they had all seen the same visual lesson, and
the image of iridescent jewels in the smooth hollow of
women's oiled, brown bellies had since recurred to all of
them, privately.

They had also seen the corpses of children, hairy like
themselves, stacked up like scrap metal, stiff and rusty, on
a beach, and men pouring oil over the children and light-
ing it. "A famine in Bachifofl Province in the Nation of
Thu," the commenter's voice had said. "Bodies of children
dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches.
On the beaches of Tins, seven hundred kilometers away in
the Nation of A-Io (and here came the jeweled navels),
33

women kept for the sexual use of male members of the
propertied class (the lotic words were used, as there was
no equivalent for either word in Pravic) lie on the sand
all day until dinner is served to them by people of the
unpropertied class." A close-up of dinnertiroe: soft mouths
champing and smiling, smooth hands reaching out for
delicacies wetly mounded in silver bowls. Then a switch
back to the blind, blunt face of a dead child, mouth open,
empty, black, dry. "Side by side," the quiet voice had said,

But the image that had risen like an oily iridescent
bubble in the boys' minds was all the same.

"How old are those films?" said Tirin, "Are they from
before the Settlement, or are they contemporary? They
never say."

"What does it matter?" Kvetur said. "They were living
like that on Urras before the Odonian Revolution. The
Odonians all got out and came here to Anarres. So prob-
ably nothing's changed—they're still at it, there." He
pointed to the great blue-green Moon.

"How do we know they are?"

"What do you mean, Tir?" asked Shevek.

"H those pictures are a hundred and fifty years old,
things could be entirely different now on Urras. I don't
say they are, but if they were, how would we know it?
We don't go there, we dont talk, there's no communica-
tion. We really have no idea what life's like on Urraa
now."

"People in PDC do. They talk to the Urrasti that man
the freighters that come in at Port of Anarres. They keep
informed. They have to, so we can keep up trade with
Urras, and know how much of a threat they pose to us,
too.'* Bedap spoke reasonably, but Tirin's reply was sharp:

"Then PDC may be informed, but we're not."

"Informedl" Kvetur said. "I've heard about Urras ever
since nurseryl I don't care if I never see another picture of
foul Urrasti cities and greasy Urrasti bodiesi"

"That's just it," said Tirin with the glee of one follow-
ing logic. **AU the material on Urras available to students
is the same. Disgusting, unmoral, excremental. But look.
H it was that bad when the Settlers left, how has it kept
on going for a hundred and fifty years? If they were so
sick, why aren't they dead? Why haven't their propertarian
societies collapsed? What are we so afraid of?"
34

"Infection,** said Bedap.

"Are we so feeble we can't withstand a little exposure?
Anyhow, they can't all be sick. No matter what their
society's like, some of them must be decent People vary
here, dont they? Are we all perfect Odonians? Look at
that snotbaU Pesiu!"

"But in a sick organism, even a healthy cell is doomed,"
said Bedap.

"Oh, you can prove anything using the Analogy, and you
know it Anyhow, how do we actually know their society
is sick?"

Bedap gnawed on his thumbnail "You're saying that
PDC and the educational supplies syndicate are lying to us
about Urras."

"No; I said we only know what we're told. And do you
know what we're told?" Tirin's dark, snub-nosed face,
clear in the bright bluish moonlight, turned to them. "Kvet
said it, a minute ago. He's got the message. You heard it:

detest Urras, hate Urraa, fear Urras."

"Why not?" Kvetur demanded. "Look how they treated
us Odoniansi"

"They gave us their Moon, didn't they?*'

"Yes, to keep us from wrecking their profiteering
states and setting up the Just society there. And as soon as
they got rid of ua, 111 bet they started building up govern-
ments and armies faster than ever, because nobody was
left to stop them. If we opened the Port to them, you
think they'd come like friends and brothers? A thousand
million of them, and twenty million of us? They'd wipe us
out, or make us all what do you call it, what's the word,
slaves, to work the mines for them!"

"AH right. I agree that it's probably wise to fear Urras.
But why hate? Hate's not functional; why are we taught
it? Could it be that if we knew what Urras was really like,
we'd like it—some of it—some of us? That what PDC
wants to prevent is not just some of them coming here,
but some of us wanting to go there?"

"Go to Urras?" Shevek said. startled.

The argued because they liked argument, liked the
swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possi-
bility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were
intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the
clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at
35

this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek.
as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed. "Who'd
ever want to go to Urras?" he demanded. **What for?*'

*To find out what another world's like. To see what a
'horse* isl"

"That's childish," Kvetur said. "There's life on some
other star systems," and he waved a hand at the moon-
washed sky. "so they say. What of it? We had the luck to
be bom herel"

"If we're better than any other human society," said
Tirin. "then we ought to be helping them. But we're for-
bidden to."

"Forbidden? Nonorganic word. Who forbids? You're
externalizing the integrative function itself," Shevek said,
leaning forward and speaking with intensity. "Order is
not *orders.' We dont leave Anarres, because we are
Anarres. Being Tirin, you cant leave Tirin's skin. You
might like to try being somebody else to see what ifs like,
but you can't. But are you kept from it by force? Are
we kept here by force? What force—what laws, govern-
ments, police? None. Simply our own being, our nature
as Odonians. It's your nature to be Tirin. and my nature
to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians,
responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our
freedom. To avoid it. would be to lose our freedom. Would
you really like to live in a society where you kave no
responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false
option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed
by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a
prison?"

"Oh. hell, no. Cant I talk? The trouble with you, Shev,
is you dont say anything till you've saved up a whole
truckload of damned heavy brick arguments, and then
you dump them all out and never look at the bleeding body
mangled beneath the keap—"

Shevek sat back, looking vindicated.

But Bedap, a heavy-set, square-faced fellow, chewed on
his thumbnail and said, "All the same, Tir's point remains.
It would be good to know that we knew all the truth
about Urras."

"Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded.

"Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but
ourselves?"

36

The sister planet shone down upon them, serene and
brilliant, a beautiful example of the improbability of the
real.

The afforestation of the West Temaenian Littoral was
one of the great undertakings of the fifteenth decad of the
Settlement on Anarres, employing nearly eighteen thou-
sand people over a period of two years.

Though the long beaches of Southeast were fertile, sup-
porting many fishing and farming communities, the arable
area was a mere strip along the sea. Inland and westward
clear across the vast plains of Southwest the land was
uninhabited except for a few isolated mining towns. It
was the region called the Dust.

In the previous geological era the Dust had been an
immense forest of holums, the ubiquitous, dominant
plant genus of Anarres. The current climate was hotter
and drier. Millennia of drought had killed the trees and
dried the soil to a fine grey dust that now rose up on
every wind, forming hills as pure of line and barren as any
sand dune. The Anarresti hoped to restore the fertility of
that restless earth by replanting the forest. This was.
Shevek thought, in accordance with me principle of
Causative Reversibility, ignored by the Sequency school
of physics currently respectable on Anarres, but still an
intimate, tacit element of Odonian thought. He would like
to write a paper showing the relationship of Odo's ideas
to the ideas of temporal physics, and particularly the in-
fluence of Causative Reversibility on her handling of the
problem of ends and means. But at eighteen he didn't
know enough to write such a paper, and he never would
know enough if he didn't get back to physics soon and out
of the damned Dust.

At night in the project camps everybody coughed, m
the daytime they coughed less; they were too busy to
cough. The dust was their enemy, the fine dry stuff that
clogged the throat and lungs; their enemy and their charge,
their hope. Once that dust had lain rich and dark in the
shade of trees. After their long work, it might do so again.

She brings the green leaf from the stone,
From heart of rock clear water running...« i
37

Gimar was always humming the tune, and now in the
hot evening returning to camp over the plain she sang the
words aloud.

"Who does? Who's *she*?" asked Shevek.

Gimar smiled. Her broad, silky face was smeared and
caked with dust, her hair was full of dust, she smelled
strongly and agreeably of sweat.

"I grew up in Southrising," she said. "Where the miners
are. Ifs a miner song."

•'What miners?'*

"Dont you know? People who were already here when
the Settlers came. Some of them stayed and joined the
solidarity. Goldminers, tinminers. They still have some
feast days and songs of their own. The tadde* was a miner,
he used to sing me that when I was little."

•*Well, then, who's 'she'?"

"I don't know, it's Just what the song says. Isn't it what
we're doing here? Bringing green leaves out of stones!"

"Sounds like religion."

"You and your fancy book-words. It's just a song. Oh,
I wish we were back at the other camp and could have
a swim. I stinki"

"I stink."

"We all stink."

"In solidarity.. ."

But this camp was fifteen kilos from the beaches of the
Temae, and there was only dust to swim in.

There was a man in camp whose name, spoken, sounded
like Shevek's: Shevet When one was called the other
answered. Shevek felt a kind of affinity for the man, a re-
lation more particular than that of brotherhood, because)
of this random similarity. A couple of times he saw Shevet
eyeing him. They did not speak to each other yet.

Shevek*s first decads in the afforestation project had
been spent in silent resentment and exhaustion. People
who had chosen to work in centrally functional fields such

•Papa. A small child may can any adult mamme or tadde,
Gimar's tadde may have been her father, an uncle, or an unrelated
adult who showed her parental or grandparental responsibility and
affection. She may have called several people tadde 'or mamme, but
the word has a more specific use than ammar (brother/sister), which
may be used to anybody.

38

as physics should not be called upon for these projects'
and special levies. Wasn't it immoral to do work you didn't
enjoy? The work needed doing, but a lot of people didn't
care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the
time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do
this work. In fact, a lot of them could do it better than he
could. He had been proud of his strength, and had always:

volunteered for the "heavies'* on tenth-day rotational
duty; but here it was day after day, eight hours a day, in
dust and heat All day he would look forward to evening
when he could be alone and think, and the instant he got
to the sleeping tent after supper his head flopped down and
he slept like a stone till dawn, and never a thought
crossed his mind.

Ha found the workmates dull and loutish, and even those
younger than himself treated him like a boy. Scornful
and resentful, he took pleasure only in writing to his
friends Tirin and Rovab in a code they had worked out
at the Institute, a set of verbal equivalents to the special
symbols of temporal physics. Written out, these seemed
to make sense as a message, but were in fact nonsense,
except for the equation or philosophical formula they
masked. Shevek's and Rovab's equations were genuine.
Tirin's letters were very funny and would have convinced
anyone that they referred to real emotions and events,
but the physics in them was dubious. Shevek sent off one
of these puzzles often, once he found that he could work
them out in his head while he was digging holes in rock
with a dull shovel in a dust storm. Tirin answered several
times, Rovab only once. She was a cold girl, he knew she-
was cold. But none of th,em at the Institute knew how
wretched he was. They hadn't been posted, just as they
were beginning independent research, to a damned trefr-
planting project. Their central function wasn't being
wasted. They were working: doing what they wanted to
do. He was not working. He was being worked.

Yet it was queer how proud you felt of what you got
done this way—all together—what satisfaction it gave.
And some of the workmates were really extraordinary
people. Gimar, for instance. At first her muscular beauty
had rather awed him, but now he was strong enough to
desire her.

"Come with me tonight, Gimar."
39

**0h, no," she said, and looked at him with so much
surprise that he said. with some dignity of pain, "I thought
we were friends."

"We are."

"Then—"

Tm partnered. He's back home.*'

"You might have said," Shevek said, going red.

"Well, it didnt occur to me I ought to. I'm sorry, Shev."
She looked so regretfully at him that he said, with somo
hope, "You dont think—"

"No. You cant woA a partnership that way, some bits
for him and some bits for others."

"Life partnership is realty against the Odonian ethic, I
think," Shevek said* harsh and pedantic.

"Shit." said Gimar in her mild voice, raving's wrong;

sharing's right What more can you share than your whole
self, your whole life, all the nights and aU the days?"

He sat with his hands between his knees, his bead
bowed, a long boy, rawboned, disconsolate, unfinished.
"I'm not up to that," he said after a while.

"You?"

"I havent really ever known anybody. You see low I
didn't understand you. I'm cut off. Can't get in. Never
will. It would be sffly for me to think about a partnership.
That sort of thing is for... for human beings...."

With timidity, not a sexual coyness but the shyness of
respect, Gimar put her kand on his shoulder. She did not
reassure him. She did not tell him he was like everybody
else. She said, "111 never know anyone like you again,
Shev. I never win forget yon."

All the same, a rejection is a rejection. For all her
gentleness he went from her with a lame soul, and angry.

The weather was very hot. There was no coolness except
in the hour before dawn.

The man named Shevet came up to Shevek one night
after supper. He was a stocky, handsome fellow of thirty.
"I'm tired of getting mixed up with you," he said. "Call
yourself something else."

The surly aggressiveness would have puzzled Shevek
earlier. Now he simply responded in kind. "Change your
own name if you dont like it," he said.

"You're one of those little profiteers who goes to school
L                       40

to keep his hands clean," the man said. "I've always
wanted to knock the shit out of one of you."

"Don't call me profiteeri" Shevek said, hut this wasnt
a verbal battle. Shevet knocked him double. He got in
several return blows, having long arms and more temper
than his opponent expected: but he was outmatched.
Several people paused to watch, saw that it was a fair
fight but not an interesting one, and went on. They were
neither offended nor attracted by simple violence. Shevek
did not call for help, so it was nobody's business but his
own. When he came to lie was lying on his back on the
dark ground between two tents.

He had a ringing in his right ear for a couple of days,
and a split lip that took long to heal because of the
dust, which irritated all sores. He and Shevet never spoke
again. He saw the man at a distance, at other cookflres,
without animosity. Shevet had given tim what he had to
give, and he had accepted the gift. though for a long
time he never weighed it or considered its nature. By the
time he did so there was no distinguishing it from another
gift, another epoch in his growing up. A girl, one who had
recently joined his work gang, came up to him just as
Shevet had in the darkness as he left the cookfire, and
his lip wasn't healed yet. ... He never could remember
what she said; she had teased him; again he responded
Isimply. They went out into the plain in the night, and
there she gave him the freedom of the flesh. That was her
gift, and he accepted it Like all children of Anarres he
had had sexual experience freely with both boys and girls,
but he and they had been children; he kad never got
further than the pleasure he assumed was all there was to
it Beshun, expert in delight, took him into the heart of
sexuality, where there is no rancor and no ineptitude,
where the two bodies striving to Join each other annihilate
the moment in their striving, and transcend the self, and
transcend time.

It was all easy now, so easy, and lovely, out in the
warm dust, in the starlight And the days were long, and
hot, and bright, and the dust smelled like Beshun's body.

He worked now in the planting crew. The trucks had
come down from Northeast full of tiny trees, thousands
of seedlings raised in the Green Mountains, where it rained
41

vp to forty inches a year, the rain belt. They planted the
little trees in the dust

When they were done, the fifty crews who had worked
the second year of the project drove away in the flatbed
trucks, and they looked back as they went. They saw what
they had done. There was a mist of green, very faint, on
the pallid curves and terraces of the desert. On the dead
land lay, very lightly, a veil of life. They cheered, sang,
shouted from truck to truck. Tears came into Shevek's
eyes. He thought. She brings the green leaf from the
stone. . . . Gimar had been posted back to Southrising
a long time ago. **What are you making faces about?" Be"
shum asked him, squeezing next to him, as the truck
jounced and miming her hand up and down his hard,
dust-whitened arm.

•'Women," Vokep said, in tile truck depot in Tin Ore,
Southwest. "Women think they own you. No woman can
really be an Odonian."

"Odo herself—?"

"Theory. And no sex life after Asieo was killed, right?
Anyhow there're always exceptions. But most women,
their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or
being owned."

"You think they're different from men there?"

"I know it. What a man wants is freedom. What a
woman wants a property. She'll only let you go if she
can trade you for something else. All women are
propertarians."

"That's a hell of a thing to say about half the human
Tace," said Shevek, wondering if the man was right. Be-
shun had cried herself sick when he got posted back to
Northwest, had raged and wept and tried to make him tell
her he couldn't live without her and insisted she couldn't
live without him and they must be partners. Partners, as
if she could have stayed with any one man for half a yearl

The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew,
lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic
it made no sense for a man to say that he had "had" a
woman. The word which came closest in meaning to
"'fuck," and had a similar secondary usage as a curse,
was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only
a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word
42

like copulate. It meant something two people did, not
something one person did, or had. This frame of words
could not contain the totality of experience any more
than any other, and Sbevek was aware of the area left
out, though he wasn't quite sure what it was. Certainly
be had felt that be owned Beshun, possessed her, on some
of those starlit nights m the Dust. And she had thought
she owned him. But they had both been wrong; and Be-
tehun, despite her sentimentality, knew it; she had kissed
him goodbye at last smiling, and let him go. She had not
owned him. His own body had, in its first outburst of adult
sexual passion, possessed him indeed—and her. But it was
over with. It had happened. It would never (he thought,
eighteen years old, sitting with a traveling-acquaintance in
the truck depot of Tin Ore at midnight over a glass of
sticky sweet fruit drink, waiting to hitch a ride on a con-
voy going north), it could never happen again. Much
would yet happen, but he would not be taken off guard a
second time, knocked down, defeated. Defeat, surrender,
had its raptures. Beshun herself might never want any joy
beyond them. And why should she? It was she, in her
freedom, who had set him free.

"You know, I don't agree," he said to long-faced Vokep,
an agricultural chemist traveling to Abbenay. "I think
men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don't
have to leam."

Vokep shook his head grimly. "It's the kids," he said.
''Having babies. Makes 'em propertarians. They won't
let go." He sighed. "Touch and go, brother, that's the rule.
Don't ever let yourself be owned."

Shevek smiled and drank his fruit juice. "I won't,'* he
said.

It was a joy to him to come back to the Regional
Institute, to see the low hills patchy with bronze-leaved
scrub bolum, the kitchen gardens, domiciles, dormitories,
workshops, classrooms, laboratories, where he had lived
sine® he was thirteen. He would always be one for whom
the return was as important as the voyage out. To (o was
not enough for him, only half enough; be must come back.
In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the
nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake
into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most
43

likely not have embarked on that years-long enterprise
had he not had profound assurance that return was possi-
ble, even though he himself might not return; that indeed
the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of
the globe, implied return. You shall not go down twice
to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he
knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world.
Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast
theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be
fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and
the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to
be at once more complex and more reassuring than a
mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the
General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you under-
stand that home is a place where you have never been.

He was glad, then, to get back to what was as close to a
home as he had or wanted. But he found his friends there
rather callow. He had grown up a good deal. this past
year. Some of the girls had kept up with him, or passed
him; they had become women. He kept clear, however, of
anything but casual contact with the girls, because he real-
ly didn't want another big binge of sex just yet; he had
some other things to do. He saw that the brightest of the
girls, like Rovab, were equally casual and wary; in the
labs and work crews or in the dormitory common rooms,
they behaved as good comrades and nothing else. The
girls wanted to complete their training and start their re-
search or find a post they liked, before they bore a child;

but they were no longer satisfied with adolescent sexual
experimentation. They wanted a mature relationship, not
a sterile one; but not yet, not quite yet.

These girls were good companions, friendly and inde-
pendent. The boys Shevek's age seemed stuck in the end of
a childishness that was running a bit thin and dry. They
were overintellectuaL They didn*t seem to want to com-
mit themselves either to work or to sex. To hear Tirin talk
he was the man who invented copulation, but all his affairs
were with girls of fifteen or sixteen; he shied away from
the ones his own age. Bedap, never very energetic sexually,
accepted the homage of a younger boy who had a homo-
sexual-idealistic crush on him, and let that suffice him. He
seemed to take nothing seriously, he had become ironical
and secretive. Shevek felt cut out from ha friendship. No
44

friendship held; even Tirin was too self-centered, and late-
ly too moody, to reassert the old bond—if Shevek had
wanted it. In fact, he did not He welcomed isolation
with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the re-
serve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response;

that his gentle but already formidably hermetic character
might form its own ambience, which only great strength,
or great devotion, could withstand. All he noticed, really,
was that he had plenty of time to work at last.

Down in Southeast, after he had got used to the steady
physical labor, and had stopped wasting his brain on code
messages and his semen on wet dreams, he had begun to
have some ideas. Now he was free to work these ideas
out, to see if there was anything in them.

The senior physicist at the Institute was named Mitis.
She was not at present directing the physics curriculum, as
all administrative jobs rotated annually among the twenty
permanent postings, but she had been at the place thirty
years, and had the best mind among them. There was
always a kind of psychological clear space around Mitis,
like the lack of crowds around the peak of a mountain. The
absence of all enhancements and enforcements of au-
thority left the real thing plain. There are people of in-
herent authority; some emperors actually have new dothes.

"I sent that paper you did on Relative Frequency to
Sabiri, in Abbenay," she said to Shevek, in her abrupt,
companionable way. "Want to see the answer?"

She pushed across the table a ragged bit of paper, evi-
dently a comer torn off a larger piece. On it in tiny scrib-
bled characters was one equation:

ts

-(R) =0

Shevek put his weight on his hands on the table and
looked down at the bit of paper with a steady gaze. His
eyes were light, and the light from the window filled
them so they seemed clear as water. He was nineteen.
Mitis fifty-five. She watched him with compassion and
admiration.

"That's what's missing," he said. His hand had found a
pencil on the table. He began scribbling on the fragment of
paper. As he wrote, his colorless face, silvered with fine
short hair, became flushed, and his ears turned red.
45

Mitis moved surreptitiously around behind the table to
sit down. She had circulatory trouble in her legs, and
needed to sit down. Her movement, however, disturbed
Shevek. He looked up with a cold annoyed stare.

"I can finish this in a day or two," he said.

"Sabul wants to see the results when you've worked it
cut"

There was a pause. Shevek's color returned to normal,
and he became aware again of the presence of Mitis,
whom he loved. "Why did you send the paper to Sabul?"
he asked. "With that big hole in it!" He smiled; the plea-
sure of patching the hole in his thinking made him radiant.

"I thought he might see where you went wrong. I
couldn't. Also I wanted him to see what you were after.
... Hell want you to come there, to Abbenay, you know.'*

The young man did not answer.

"Do you want to go?"

••Not yet."

"So I Judged. But you must go. For the books, and for
the minds you'n meet there. You will not waste that mind
in a deserti" Mitis spoke with sudden passion. **It's your
duty to seek out the best, Shevek. Dont let false egalitari-
anism ever trick you. You'll work with Sabul, he's good,
hell work you hard. But you should be free to find the line
you want to follow. Stay here one more quarter, then go.
And take care, in Abbenay. Keep free. Power inheres in a
center. You're going to the center. I don't know Sabid
well; I know nothing against him; but keep this in mind:

you wffl be his man."

The singular forms of the possessive pronoun in Pravic
were used mostly for emphasis; idiom avoided them.
Little children might say "my mother," but very soon they
learned to say "the mother." Instead of "my hand hurts," it
was "the hand hurts me," and so on; to say "this one is
mine and that's yours" in Pravic, one said. "I use this
one and you use that" Mitis's statement, "You will be
his man," had a strange sound to it. Shevek looked at her
blankly.

"There's work for you to do,'* Mitis said. She had black
eyes, they flashed as if with anger. "Do it!" Then she went
out, for a group was waiting for her in the lab. Confused,
Shevek looked down at the bit of scribbled paper. He
thought Mitis had been telling him to hurry up and correct
46

his equations.. It was not till much later that he understood
what she had been telling him.

The night before he left for Abbenay his fellow students
gave a party for him. Parties were frequent, on slight pre-
texts, but Shevek was surprised by the energy that went in-
to this one, and wondered why it was such a fine one.
Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced
them; he had no idea they liked him.

Many of them must have saved up daily allowances for
the party for days before. There were incredible amounts
of food. The order for pastries was so large that the re-
fectory baker had let his fancy loose and produced hither-
to unknown delights: spiced wafers, little peppered squares
to go with the smoked fish, sweet fried cakes, succulently
greasy. There were fruit drinks, preserved fruit from the
Keran Sea region, tiny salt shrimp, piles of crisp sweet-
potato chips. The rich plentiful food was intoxicating.
Everybody got very merry, and a few got sick.

There were skits and entertainments, rehearsed and im-
promptu. Tirin got himself up in a collection of rags from
the recycle bin and wandered among them as the Poor
Urrasti, the Beggarman—one of the lotic words every-
body had learned in history. "Give me money," he whined,
shaking his hand under their noses. "Money! Money! Why
don't you give me any money? You havent got any? Liarsi
Filthy propertarians! Profiteers! Look at all that food, how
did you get it if you haven't any money?" He then offered
himself for sale. "Bay me, bay me, for just a little money,"
he wheedled.

"It isn't bay, it's buy," Rovab corrected him.

"Bay me, buy me, who cares, look, what a beautiful
body, don't you want it?" Tirin crooned, wagging his
slender hips and batting his eyes. He was at last publicly
executed with a fish knife and- reappeared in normal cloth-
ing. There were skillful harp players and singers among
them, and there was plenty of music and dancing, but more
talk. They all talked as if they were to be struck dumb
tomorrow.

As the night went on young lovers wandered off to
copulate, seeking the single rooms; others got sleepy and
went off to the dormitories; at last a small group was left
amid the empty cups, the fishbones, and the pastry
47

crumbs, which they would have to clean up before morn-
ing. But it was hours yet till morning. They talked. They
nibbled on this and that as they talked. Bedap and
Tirin and Shevek were there, a couple of other boys,
three girls. They talked about the spatial representation
of time as rhythm, and the connection of the ancient
theories of the Numerical Harmonies with modern tem-
poral physics. They talked about the best stroke for long-
distance swimming. They talked about whether their
childhoods had been happy. They talked about what
happiness was.

"Suffering is a misunderstanding," Shevek said, leaning
forward, his eyes wide and light. He was still lanky, with
big hands, protruding ears, and angular joints, but in the
perfect health and strength of eariy manhood he was very
beautiful. His dun-colored hair, like the others', was fine
and straight, worn at its full length and kept off the fore-
head with a band. Only one of them wore her hair dif-
ferently, a girl with high cheekbones and a flat nose; she
had cut her dark hair to a shiny cap all round. She was
watching Shevek with a steady, serious gaze. Her lips
were greasy from eating fried cakes, and there was a
crumb on her chin.

"It exists," Shevek said, spreading out his hands. "It's
real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can't pretend
that it doesn't exist, or will ever cease to exist Suffering is
the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you
know it You know it as the truth. Of course it's right to
cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social
organism does. But no society can change the nature of
existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that
pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social
suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The
root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief;

if we live fifty years, we'll nave known pain for fifty
years. And in the end we'll die. That's the condition we're
born on. I'm afraid of lifel There are times I—I am very
frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I won-
der if it isn't all a misunderstanding—this grasping after
happiness, this fear of pain. ... If instead of fearing it
and running from it, one could ... get through it, go
beyond it. There is something beyond it. It's the self that
suffers, and there's a place where the self—ceases. I dont
48

know how to say it But I believe that the reality—the
truth that I recognize in suffering as I don't in comfort
and happiness—that the reality of pain is not pain. H
you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way."

"The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity," said a
tall, soft-eyed giri. "Love is the true condition of human
life."

Bedap shook his head. "No. Shev*s right," be said.
"Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong,
and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have
muck choice about enduring iti We wffl, whether we want
to or not**

The girl with short hair shook her head vehemently.
^But we won't! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes
all the way, all the way through. The rest of us keep pre-
tending we're happy, or else just go numb. We suffer,
but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing."

"What are we supposed to do," said Tirin, "go hit our
heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure
we suffer enough?"

"You're making a cult of pain," another said. "An Odo-
nian'a goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunc-
tional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psy-
chologically and socially it's merely destructive."

"What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to
suffering—her own and others'?" Bedap retorted.

"But the whole principal of mutual aid is designed to
prevent sufferingi"

Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling,
his face intense and quiet. "Have you ever seen anybody
die?" he asked the others. Most of them had, in a domicile
or on volunteer hospital duty. All but one had helped at
one time or another to bury the dead.

"There was a man when I was in camp in Southeast It
was the first time I saw anything like this. There was
some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and
caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived
about two hours. He couldnt have been saved; there was
no reason for him to live that long, no justification for
those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anes-
thetics from the coast. I stayed with him, along with a
couple of girls. We'd been there loading the plane. There
wasnt a doctor. You couldn't do anything for him, except
49

just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly
conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands.
I dont think he knew the rest of his body was all charred,
he felt it mostly in his hands. You couldnt touch him to
comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at
your touch, and he'd scream. You couldn't do anything
for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were
there, I don't know. It didn't do him any good. You
couldnt do anything for him. Then I saw . .. you see ...
I saw that you can't do anything for anybody. We can't
save each other. Or ourselves."

**What have you left, then? Isolation and despairl You're
denying brotherhood, Shevekl" the tall girl cried.

"No—no, I'm not. I'm trying to say what I think broth-
erhood really is. It begins—it begins in shared pain."

"Then where does it end?"

"I dont know. I don't know yet."

50




When Shevefc woke, having Slept straight through his first
morning on Urras, his nose was stufiy, his throat was
sore, and he coughed a lot He thought he had a cold—
even Odonian hygiene had not outwitted the common
cold—but the doctor who was waiting to check him over,
a dignified, elderly man, said it was more likely a massive
hay-fever, an allergic reaction to the foreign dusts and
pollens of Urras. He issued pills and a shot, which Shevek
accepted patiently, and a tray of lunch, which Shevek ac-
cepted hungrily. The doctor asked him to stay in his apart-
ment, and left him. As soon as he had finished eating, he
commenced his exploration of Urraa, room by room.

The bed, a massive bed on four legs, with a mattress
far softer than that of the bunk on the Mindful, and
complex bedclothes, some silky and some warm and thick,
and a lot of pillows like cumulus clouds, had a room all to
itself. The floor was covered with springy carpeting:

there was a chest of drawers of beautifully carved and
polished wood, and a closet big enough to hold the cloth-
ing of a ten-man dormitory. Then there was the great
common room with the fireplace, which he had seen last
night; and a third room, which contained a bathtub, a
washstand, and an elaborate shitstool. This room was
51

evidently for his sole use. as it opened off the bedroom,
and contained only one of each kind of fixture, though
each was of a sensuous luxury that far surpassed mere
eroticism and partook, in Shevek*s view, of a kind of ulti-
mate apotheosis of the excremental. He spent nearly an
hour in this third room, employing all the fixtures in turn,
and getting very clean in the process. The deployment of
water was wonderful. Faucets stayed on till turned off; tha
bathtub must hold sixty liters, and the stool used at least
five liters in flushing. This was really not surprising. The
surface of Urras was five-sixths water. Even its deserts
were deserts of ice, at the poles. No need to economize;

no drought... But what became of the shit? He brooded
over this, kneeling by the stool after investigating its
mechanism. They must filter it out of the water at a
manure plant There were seaside communities on Anarres
that used such a system for reclamation. He intended to
ask about this, but never got around to it There were
many questions he never did ask on Urras.

Despite kis stuffy head he felt well, and restless. The
rooms were so warm that he put off getting dressed, and
stalked about them naked. He went to the windows of the
big room and stood looking out. The room was high. He
was startled at first and drew back, unused to being in a
building of more than one storey. It was like looking down
from a dirigible; one felt detached from the ground,
dominant, uninvolved. The windows looked right over a
grove of trees to a white building with a graceful square
tower. Beyond this building the land fell away to a broad
valley. All of it was fanned, for the innumerable patches
of green that colored it were rectangular. Even where the
green faded into blue distance, the dark lines of lanes.
hedgerows, or trees could still be made out, a network as
fine as the nervous system of a living body. At last hills
rose up bordering the valley, blue fold behind blue fold,
soft and dark under the even. pale grey of the sky.

It was the most beautiful view Shevek had ever seen.
The tenderness and vitality of Ihe colors, the mixture of
rectilinear human design and powerful, proliferate natural
contours, the variety and harmony of the elements, gave
an impression of complex wholeness such as he had
never seen, except perhaps, foreshadowed on a small
scale in certain serene and thoughtful human faces.
52

Compared to this, every scene Anarres could offer, even
the Plain of Abbenay and the gorges of the Ne Theras,
was meager: barren, arid, and inchoate. The deserts of
Southwest had a vast beauty, but it was hostile, and
timeless. Even where men farmed Anarres most closely,
their landscape was like a crude sketch in yellow chalk
compared with this fulfilled magnificence of life, rich in the
sense of history and of seasons to come, inexhaustible.

This is what a world is supposed to look like, Shevek
thought

And somewhere, out in that blue and green splendor,
something was singing: a small voice, high up, starting and
ceasing, incredibly sweet. What was it? A little, sweet wild
voice, a music in midair.

He listened, and his breath caught in his throat.

There was a knock at the door. Turning naked and
wondering from the window. Shevek said, "Come int"

A man entered, carrying packages. He stopped just in-
side the door. Shevek crossed the room, saying his own
name, Anarresti-style, and, Urrasd-style, holding out his
band.

The man, who was fifty or so, with a lined, worn face,
said something Shevek did not understand a word of, and
did not shake hands. Perhaps he was prevented by the
packages, but he made no effort to shift them and free his
hand. His face was extremely grave. It was possible that
he was embarrassed.

Shevek, who thought he had at least mastered Urrasti
customs of greeting, was nonplused. "Come on in," he
repeated, and then added, since the Urrasti were forever
using titles and honorific*, "sirl"

The man went off into another unintelligible speech, si-
dling meantime towards the bedroom. Shevek caught sev-
eral words of lotic this time, but could make no sense of
the rest. He let the fellow go, since he seemed to want to
get to the bedroom. Perhaps he was a roommate? But
there was only one bed. Shevek gave him up and went
back to the window, and the man scuttled on into the bed-
room and thumped around in it for a few minutes. Just as
Shevek had decided that he was a night worker who used
the bedroom days, an arrangement sometimes made in
temporarily overcrowded domiciles, he came out again. He
said something—'There you are, sir," perhaps?—and
53

ducked his head in a curious fashion, as if he thought that
Shevek, five meters away, was about to hit him in the face.
He left, Shevek stood by the windows, slowly realizing that
he had for the first time in his life been bowed to.

He went into the bedroom and discovered that the bed
had been made.

Slowly, thoughtfully, he got dressed. He was putting
on his shoes when the next knock came.

A group entered, in a different manner; in a normal
manner, it seemed to Shevek, as if they had a right to
be there, or anywhere they chose to be. The man with
the packages had been hesitant, he had almost slunk in.
And yet his face, and his hands, and his clothing, had come
closer to Sbcvek's notion of a normal human being's ap-
pearance than did those of the new visitors. The slinking
man had behaved strangely, but he had looked like an
AnarrestL These four behaved like Anarresti. but looked,
with their shaven faces and gorgeous clothes, like creatures
of an alien species.

Shevek managed to recognize one of them as Pae, and
the others as men who had been with him an last evening.
He explained that he bad not caught their names, and
they reintroduced themselves, smiling: Dr. ChifoOisk,
Dr. Oiie, and Dr. Atro.

-Oh, by darnnl** Shevek said. -Atrot I am glad to meet
you!" He put his hands on the old man's shoulders and
kissed his cheek, before thinking that this brotherly
greeting, common enough on Anarres, might not be ac-
ceptable here.

Atro, however, embraced him heartily in return, and
looked up into his face with filmy grey eyes. Shevek
realized that he was nearly blind. "My dear Shevek,*' he
*said, "welcome to A"Io—welcome to Urras—welcome
homel"

"So many years we have written letters, destroyed each
other's theories!"

"You were always the better destroyer. Here, lold on.
I've got something for you." The old man felt about in his
pockets. Under his velvet university gown he wore a Jacket,
under that a vest, under that a shirt, and probably another         .
layer under that. All of these garments, and his trousers,         i
contained pockets. Shevek watched quite fascinated as
Atro went through six or seven pockets, all containing         i
54                                  ^

belongings, before he came up wiA a small cube of yeDow
metal mounted on a bit of polished wood. "There," he
said. peering at it "Your award. The Seo Oen prize, you
know. The cash is in your account Here. Nine years late,
but better late than never." His hands trembled as he
handed the thing to Shevek.

It was heavy; the yellow cube was solid gold. Shevek
stood motionless, holding it

"I don't know about you young men,'* said Atro, **but
rm going to sit down." They all sat down in the deep, soft
chairs, which Shevek had already examined, puzzled by
the material with which they were covered, a nonwoven
brown stuff that felt like skin. "How old were you nine
years ago, Shevek?"

Atro was the foremost living physicist on Urras. There
was about him not only the dignity of age but also the
blunt self-assurance of one accustomed to respect This
was nothing new to Shevek. Atro had precisely the one
kind of authority that Shevek recognized. Also, it gave
him pleasure to be addressed at last simply by his name.

"I was twenty-nine when I finished the Principles, Atro."

"Twenty-nine? Good God, That makes you the youngest
recipient of the Seo Oen for a century or so. Didn't get
around to giving me mine till I was sixty or so. ... How
old were you, then, when you first wrote me?"

"About twenty."

Atro snorted. 'Took you for a man of forty theni"

**What about Sabul?** Oiic inquired. Oiie was even
shorter than most Urrasti, who all seemed short to Shevek;

he had a flat, bland face and oval, jet-black eyes. "There
was a period of six or eight years when you never wrote,
and Sabul kept in touch with us; but he never has talked
on your radio link-up with us. We've wondered what your
relationship is."

"Sabul is the senior member of the Abbenay Institute
in physics," said Shevek. "I used to work with him.**

"An older rival; jealous; meddled with your books; been
clear enough. We hardly need an explanation, Oiie,*' said
the fourth man, Chifoflisk, in a harsh voice. He was
middle-aged, a swarthy, stocky man with the fine hands
of a desk worker. He was the only one of them whose
face was not completely shaven: he had left the chin
55

bristling to match Us short, iron-grey Aead hair. **No
need to pretend that an you Odonian brothers are full of
brotherly love," he said. '"Human nature is human nature.*'

Shevek's lack of response was saved from seeming signi-
ficant by a volley of sneezes. "I do not have a handker-
chief." he apologized, wiping his eyes.

"Take mine,'* said Atro, and produced a snowy hand-
kerchief from one of his many pockets. Shevek took it, and
as he did so an importunate memory wrung his heart.
He thought of his daughter Sadik, a little dark-eyed girl,
saying, "You can share the handkerchief I use.** That
memory, which was very dear to him, was unbearably
painful now. Trying to escape it, he smiled at random
and said, "I am allergic to your planet The doctor says
this."

"Good God. you wont be sneezing like that perma-
nently?" old Atro asked, peering at him.

"Hasn't your man been in yet?" said Pae.

"My roan?"

'The servant. He was supposed to bring you some
things. Handkerchiefs included. Just enough to tide you
over tiH you can shop for yourself. Nothing choice—Tm
afraid there's very little choice in ready-made clothes for
a man your heightl"

When Shevek had sorted this out (Pae spoke in a rapid
drawl, which matched with his soft, handsome features),
he said. •That is kind of you. I feel—" He looked at Atro.
"I am, you know the Beggannan," he said to the old
man, as he had said to Dr. Kimoe on the Mindful. "I
could not bring money, we do not use it. I could not
bring gifts, we us^iothing that you lack. So I come, like
a good Odonian, •with empty hands.' *'

Atro and Pae assured him that he was a guest, there
was no question of payment, it was their privilege. "Be-
sides," Chifoilisk said in his sour voice, "the loti Govern-
ment foots the bin."

Pae gave him a sharp glance, but Chifoilisk, instead of
returning it, looked straight at Shevek. On his swarthy
face was an expression that he made no effort to hide^
but which Shevek could not interpret: warning, or com-
plicity?

'There speaks the unregenerate Tbuvian," old Atro said
56

with his snort. "But you mean to say, Shevek, that you
brought nothing at all with you—no papers, no new work?
I was looking forward to a book. Another revolution in
physics. See these pushy young fellows stood on their
heads, the way you stood me with the Principles. What
have you been working on?**

"Well, I have been reading Pae—Dr. Pae's paper on the
block universe, on Paradox and Relativity."

"All very well. Saio's our current star, no doubt of that
Least of all in his own mind, eh, Saio? But what's that to
do with the price of cheese? Where's your General Tem-
poral Theory?"

"In my head," said Shevefc with a broad, genial smile.

There was a very little pause.

Oiie asked him if he had seen the work on relativity
theory by an alien physicist, Ainsetain of Terra. Shevek
had not. They were intensely interested in it, except for
Atro, who bad outlived intensity. Pae ran off to las room
to get Shevek a copy of the translation. "It's several hun-
dred years old, but there's fresh ideas in /t for us," he said.

"Maybe," said Atro, "but none of these offworiders can
follow our physics. The Hainish call it materialism, and
the Terrans call it mysticism, and then they both give up.
Don't let this fad for everything alien sidetrack you, She-
vek. They've got nothing for us. Dig your own pigweed, as
my father used to say." He gave his senile snort and
levered himself up out of the chair. "Come on out for a
turn in the Grove with me. No wonder you're stuffy,
cooped up in here."

"The doctor says I'm to stay in this room three days. I
might be—infected? Infectious?**

"Never pay any attention to doctors, my dear fellow."

"Perhaps in this case, though. Dr. Atro," Pae suggested
in his easy, conciliating voice.

"After all, the doctor's from the Government, isnt he?*'
said Chifoilisk, with evident malice.

"Best man they could find, Pm sure," Atro said un-
smiling, and took his leave without urging Shevek further.
Chifoilisk went with him. The two younger men stayed
with Shevek, talking physics, for a long time.

With immense pleasure, and with that same sense of
profound recognition, of finding something the way it was
57

meant to be, Shevek discovered for the first time in'fa»
life the conversation of his equals.

Mitis, though a splendid teacher, had never been able
to follow him into the new areas of theory that he had/
with her encouragement, begun to explore. Gvarab was the
only person he had met whose training and ability were
comparable to his own, and be and Gvarab had met too
late, at the very end of her life. Since those days Shevek
had worked with many people of talent, but because
he had never been a full-time member of the Abbenay
Institute, he had never been able to take them far
enough; they remained bogged down in the old problems,
the classical Sequency physics. He had had no equals.
Here, in the realm of inequity, he met them at last

It was a revelation, a liberation. Physicists, mathemati-
cians, astronomers, logicians, biologists, all were here at
the University, and they came to him or he went to them,
and they talked, and new worlds were born of tbeifttalk-
ing. It is of the nature of idea to be communicated:

written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass, It craves light,
likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for
being stepped on.

Even on that first afternoon at the University, with One
and Pae, he knew he had found something he had longed
for ever since, as boys and on a boyish level, he and Tirin
and Bedap had used to talk half the night, teasing and
daring each other into always bolder flights of mind.
He vividly remembered some of those nights. He saw
Tirin, Tirin saying, "K we knew what Urras was really
like, maybe some of us would want to go there." And he
had been so shocked by the idea that he had jumped all
over Tirin, and Tir had backed down at once; he had al-
ways backed down, poor damned soul, and he had al-
ways been right

Conversation had stopped. Pae and Oiie were silent

"I'm sorry," he said. "The head is heavy."

"How*& the gravity?" Pae asked, with the charming
smile of a man who, like a bright child, counts on his
charm.

"I don't notice," Shevek said. "Only in the, what is
this?"

"Knees—knee joints."

58

"Yes, knees. Function is impaired. But I will get ac-
customed." He looked at Pae, then at Oiie. -'There is a
question. But I don't wish to give offense."

"Never fear, sir!" Pae said.

Oiie said, "I'm not sure you know how." Oiie was not
a likable fellow, like Pae. Even talking physics he had an
evasive, secretive style. And yet beneath the style, there
was something, Shevek felt, to trust; whereas beneath
Pae's charm, what was there? Well, no matter. He bad to
trust them all, and would. "Where are women?"

Pae laughed. Oiie smiled and asked, "In what sense?"

"All senses. I met women at the party last night—five,
ten—hundreds of men. None were scientists, I think. Who
were they?"

"Wives. One of them was my wife, m fact," Oiie said
with his secretive smile.

"Where are other women?"

"Oh, no difficulty at all there, sir,'* Pae said promptly.
"Just tell us your preferences, and nothing could be sim-
pler to provide."

"One does hear some picturesque speculations about
Anarresti customs, but I rather think we can come up
with almost anything you had in mind," said Oiie.

Shevek had no idea what they were talking about. He
scratched his bead. "Are aB the scientists here men, then?"

"Scientists?" Oiie asked, incredulous.

Pae coughed. "Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, they're att
men. There are some female teachers in the girls' schools,
of course. But they never get past Certificate level."

"Why not?"

"Cant do the math; no head for abstract thought; don't
belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is
done with the uterusl Of course, there's always a few ex-
ceptions, Godawful brainy women with vaginal atrophy."

"You Odonians let women study science?" Oiie inquired.

"Well, they are in the sciences, yes."

"Not many, I hope."

"Well, about half."

"I've always said," said Pae, "that giri technicians prop-
erly handled could take a good deal of the load off the men
in any laboratory situation. They're actually defter and
quicker than men at repetitive tasks, and more docile—
59

less easily bored. We could free men for original work
much sooner, if we used women."

"Not in my lab, you won't,** said Oiie. "Keep 'em in
their place."

"Do you find any women capable of original intellectual
work. Dr. Shevek?"

"Well, it was more that they found me. Mitis, in North-
setting, was my teacher. Also Gvarab; you know of her, I

think."

"Gvarab was a woman?" Pae said in genuine surprise,
and laughed,

Oiie looked unconvinced and offended. "Can*t tell from
your names, of course," he said coldly. "You make a point,
I suppose, of drawing no distinction between the sexes."

Shevek said mildly, "Odo was a woman."

"There you have it," Oiie said. He did not shrug. bft
he very nearly shrugged. Pae looked respectful, and
nodded, just as he did when old Atro maundered.

Shevek saw that he had touched in these men an im-
personal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they,
like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a sup-
pressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He
had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but
possession. They were possessed.

"A beautiful, virtuous woman," Pae said, "is an inspira-
tion to us—the most precious thing on earth."

Shevek felt extremely uncomfortable. He got up and
went over to the windows. "Your world is very beautiful,"
he said. "I wish I could see more. While I must stay inside,
will you give me books?**

**0f course, sirl What sort?"

"History, pictures, stories, anything. Maybe they should
be books for children. You see, I know very little. We
team about Urras, but mostly about Odo's times. Before
that was eight and one half thousand years! And then since
the Settlement of Anarres is a century and a half; since
the last ship brought the last Settlers—ignorance. We ig-
nore you; you ignore us. You are our history. We are
perhaps your future. I want to leam, not to ignore. It is
the reason I came. We must know each other. We are not
primitive men. Our morality is no longer tribal, it cannot
be. Such ignorance is a wrong, from which wrong will
arise. So I come to leam."

60

He spoke very earnestly. Pae assented with enthusiasm.
"Exactly, sirl We are all in complete agreement with your
aims!"

Oiie looked at him from those black, opaque, oval
eyes, and said, "Then you come, essentially, as an emis-
sary of your society?"

Shevek returned to sit on the marble seat by the hearth,
which he already felt as his seat, his territory. He wanted
a territory. He felt the need for caution. But he felt more
strongly the need that had brought him across the dry
abyss from the other world, the need for communication,
the wish to unbuild walls.

*'I come,*' he said carefully, "aa a syndic of the Syndicate
of Initiative, the group that talks with Urras on the radio
these last two years. But I am not, you know, an ambassa-
dor from any authority, any institution. I hope you did
not ask me as that"

"No," Oiie said. "We asked you—Shevek the physicist
With the approval of our government and the Council of
World Governments, of course. But you are here as the
private guest of leu Eun University."

"Good."

"But we haven't been sure whether or not you came
•with the approval of—" He hesitated.

Shevek grinned. "Of my government?"

"We know that nominally there's no government on
Anarres. However, obviously there's administration. And
we gather that the group that sent you, your Syndicate, is
a kind of faction; perhaps a revolutionary faction."

"Everybody on Anarres is a revolutionary, Oiie. . . .
The network of administration and management is called
PDC, Production and Distribution Coordination. They are
a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives, and
individuals who do productive work. They do not govern
persons; they administer production. They have no au-
thority either to support me or to prevent me. They can
only tell us the public opinion of us—where we stand in
the social conscience. That's what you want to know? Well,
my friends and I are mostly disapproved of- Most people
on Anarres dont want to leam about Urras. They fear it
and want nothing to do with the propertarians. I am sorry
if I am rudel It is the same here, with some people, is it
61

not? The contempt, the fear. the tribalism. Wel^ so I

came to begin to change that."

''Entirely on your own initiative," said Oiie.            /
**It is the only initiative I acknowledge," Shevek said,

smiling, in dead earnest

He spent the next couple of days talking with the
scientists who came to see him, reading the books Pae
brought him, and sometimes simply standing at the double-
arched windows to gaze at the coming of summer to the
great valley, and to listen for the brief, sweet conversations
out there in the open air. Birds: he knew the singers'
name now, and what they looked like from pictures in the
books, but still when he heard the song or caught the flash
of wings from tree to tree, he stood in wonder like a child^

He had expected to feel so strange, here on Unas, so"
lost, alien, and confused—and he felt nothing of the kind.
Or course there were endless things he did not understand.
He only glimpsed, now, how many things: this whole in-
credibly complex society with all its nations, classes,
castes, cults, customs, and its magnificent, appalling, and
interminable history. And each individual he met was a
puzzle, full of surprises. But they were not the gross, cold
egoists he had expected them to be: they were as complex
and various as their culture, as their landscape; and they
were intelligent; and they were kind. They treated him like
a brother, they did all they could to make him feel not lost.
not alien, but at home. And he did feel at home. He could
not help it. The whole world, the softness of the air, the
fall of sunlight across the hills, the very pull of the heavier
gravity on his body, asserted to him that this was home
indeed, his race's world; and all its beauty was his birth-
right.

The silence, the utter silence of Anarres: he thought of
it at night. No birds sang there. There were no voices
there but human voices. Silence, and the barren lands.

On the third day old Atro brought him a pile of news-
papers. Pae, who was Shevek's very frequent companion,
said nothing to Atro, but when the old man left he told
Shevek, "Awful trash, those papers, sir. Amusing, but don't
believe anything you read in them."

Shevek took up the topmost paper. R was badly
62

printed on coarse paper—the first crudely made artifact
he had handled on Urras. In fact it looked like the PDC
bulletins and regional reports that served as newspapers
on Anarres, but its style was very different from those
smudgy, practical, factual publications. It was fun of ex-
clamation points and pictures. There was a picture of She-
vek in front of the spaceship, with Pae holding his arm and
scowling. FIRST MAN FROM THE MOON! said the
huge print over the picture. Fascinated, Shevek read on.

His first step on Earthi Urras* first visitor from the
Anarres Settlement in 170 years. Dr. Shevek, was
photographed yesterday at his arrival on the regular
Moon freighter run at Peier Space Port. The dis-
tinguished scientist, winner of the Seo Oen Prize for
service to all nations through science, has accepted a
professorship at leu Bun University, an honor never
before accorded to an off-worlder. Asked about his
feelings on first viewing Urras, the tall, distinguished
physicist replied, "It is a great honor to be invited to
your beautiful planet. I hope that a new era of all-
Cetian friendship is now beginning, when the Twin
Planets will move forward together in brotherhood."

**But I never said aaythingi" Shevek protested to Pae.
"Of course not. We didn't let that lot get near you. That
doesnt cramp a birdseed journalist's imagination! They'll
report you as saying what they want you to say, no matter
what you do say, or don't."

Shevek chewed his lip. "Well," he said at last, "if I had
said anything, it would have been like that But what is.
•all-Cetian*?"

"The Terrans cafl va *Cetians/ From their word for
our sun, I believe. The popular press has picked it up
lately, there's a sort of fad for the word."
"Then 'aIl-Cetian' means Urras and Anarres together?"
"I suppose so," Pae said with marked lack of interest.
Shevek went on reading the papers. He read that he
was a towering giant of a man, that he was unshaven and
possessed a *mane,' whatever that was, of greying hair,
that he was thirty-seven, forty-three-and fifty-six; that ho
had written a great work of physics called (the spelling)
63

depended on the paper) Principals of Simultaneity or Prin-
ciples of Simiultany, that he was a goodwill ambassador
from the Odonian government, that he was a vegetarian.
and that, like all Anarresti, he did not drink. At this he. \
broke down and laughed tffl his ribs hurt. "By damn, they
do have imagination! Do they think we live on water va-
por, like the rockmoss?"

"They mean you don't drink alcoholic liquors," said
Pae, also laughing. *The one thing everybody knows about
Odonians, I suppose, is that you don't drink alcohol. Is it

true, by the way?"

"Some people distill alcohol from fermented holum ^
root, for drinking. They say it gives the unconscious free
play, like brainwave training. Most people prefer that, it's
very easy and doesn't cause a disease. Is that common

here?"
"Drinking is. I don't know about this disease. What's it)

called?"

"Alcoholism, I think."

"Oh, I see. . . . But what do working people do oa
Anarres for a bit of jollity, to escape the woes of the

world together for a night?"

Shevek looked blank. "Well, we ... I don't know. Per-
haps our woes are inescapable?"

"Quaint," Pae said, and smiled disarmingty.
Shevek pursued his reading. One of the journals was in a
language he did not know, and one in a different alphabet
altogether. The one was from Thu, Pae explained, and
the other from Benbili, a nation in the western hemisphere.
The paper from Thu was well printed and sober in format;

Pae explained that it was a government publication. "Here
in A-Io, you see, educated people get their news from the
telefax, and radio and television, and the weekly reviews.
These papers are read by the lower classes almost exclu-
sively—written by semiliterates for semiliterates, as you
can see. We have complete freedom of the press m A-Io,
which inevitably means we get a lot of trash. The Thuvian
paper is much better written but it reports only those facts
which the Thuvian Central Presidium wants reported. Cen-
sorship is absolute, in Thu. The state is all, and all for the
state. Hardly the place for an Odonian, eh, sir?"
"And this paper?"

64




"I really have no idea. Benbili's a backward sort of
country. Always having revolutions."

"A group of people in Benbili sent us a message on the
Syndicate wave length, not long before I left Abbenay.
They called themselves Odonians. Are there any such
groups here, in A-Io?"

"Not that I ever heard of. Dr. Shevek."

The wall. Shevek knew the wall, by now, when he
came up against it The wall was this young man's
charm, courtesy, indifference.

"I think you are afraid of me, Pae," he said, abruptly
and genially.

"Afraid of you, sir?"

"Because I am, by my existence, disproof of the ne-
cessity of the state. But what is to fear? I will not hurt
you, Saio Pae, you know. I am personally quite harmless.
. . . Listen, I am not a doctor. We do not use titles. I am
called Shevek."

"I know, I'm sorry, sir. In our terms, you see, it seems
disrespectful. It just doesn't seem right" He apologized
wmningly, expecting forgiveness.

"Can you not recognize me as an equal?" Shevek asked,
watching him without either forgiveness or anger.

Fae was for once nonplused. "But really, sir, you are,
you know, a very important man—"

"There is no reason why you should change your habits
for me," Shevek said. "It does not matter. I thought you
might be glad to be free of the unnecessary, that's alL"

Three days of confinement indoors left Shevek charged
with surplus energy, and when he was released he wore
out his escorts in his first eagerness to see everything at
once. They took him over the University, which was a city
in itself, sixteen thousand students and faculty. With its
dormitories, refectories, theaters, meeting rooms, and so
on, it was not very different from an Odonian community,
except that it was very old, was exclusively male, was
incredibly luxurious, and was not organized federatively
but hierarchically, from the top down. All the same,
Shevek thought, it felt like a community. He had to remind
himself of the differences.

He was driven out into the country in hired cars,
splendid machines of bizarre elegance. There were not
65

many of them on the roads: the hire was expensive, and
few people owned a car privately, because they were
heavily taxed. All such luxuries which if freely allowed to
the public would tend to drain irreplaceable natural re-
sources or to foul the environment with waste products
were strictly controlled by regulation and taxation. His
guides dwelt on this with some pride. A-Io had led the
world for centuries, they said, in ecological control and the
husbanding of natural resources. The excesses of the Ninth
Millennium were ancient history, their only lasting efEecff
being the shortage of certain metals, which fortunately
could be imported from the Moon.

Traveling by car or train, he saw villages, farms, towns;

fortresses from the feudal days; the ruined towers of Ae,
ancient capital of an empire, forty-four hundred years
old. He saw the farmlands, lakes, and hills of Avan Prov-
ince, me heartland of A-Io, and on the northern skyline
the peaks of the Meitei Range, white, gigantic. The beauty
of the land and the well-being of its people remained a
perpetual marvel to him. The guides were right: the Ur-
rasti knew how to use their world. He had been taught
as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity,
iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the
people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well
dressed, well fed, and, contrary to his expectations, in-
dustrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be
ordered to do things. Just like Anarresti, they were simply
busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed
that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to
work—his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy—
and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he
would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless
workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb
cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of
profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of
the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.

He would have liked to talk to some of those sturdy,
tself-respecting-lookmg people he saw in the small towns,
to ask them for instance if they considered themselves to
be poor; for if these were the poor, he had to revise
his understanding of the word. But there never seemed to
be time, with all his guides wanted him to see.
66

The other big cities of A-Io were too distant to be
reached in a day's tour, but he was taken to Nio Esseia,
fifty kilometers from the University, frequently. A whole
series of receptions in his honor was held there. He did not
enjoy these much, they were not at all his idea of a party.
Everyone was very polite and talked a great deal, but not
about anything interesting; and they smiled so much they
looked anxious. But their clothes were gorgeous, indeed
they seemed to put all the lightheartedness their manner
lacked into the clothes, and their food, and all the
different things they drank, and the lavish furnishings and
ornaments of the rooms in the palaces where the recep-
tions were held,

He was shown the sights of Nio Esseia: a city of five
million—a quarter the population of his whole planet.
They took him to Capitol Square and showed him the
high bronze doors of the Directorate, the seat of the
Government of A-Io; he was permitted to witness a
debate in the Senate and a committee meeting of the
Directors. They took him to the Zoo, the National Museum,
the Museum of Science and Industry. They took him to a
school, where charming children in blue and white uni-
forms sang the national anthem of A-Io for him. They
took him through an electronic parts factory, a fully
automated steel mill, and a nuclear fusion plant, so that
fae could see how efficiently a propertarian economy ran its
manufacturing and power supply. They took him through
a new housing development put up by the government so
that he could see how the state looked after its people.
They took him on a boat tour down the Sua Estuary,
crowded with shipping from all over the planet, to the
sea. They took him to the High Courts of Law, and he
spent a whole day listening to civil and criminal cases
being tried, an experience that left him bewildered and
appalled; but they insisted that he should see what there
was to be seen, and be taken wherever he wanted to go.
When he asked, with some diffidence, if he might see the
place where Odo was buried, they whisked him straight
to the old cemetery in the Trans-Sua district. They even
allowed newsmen from the disreputable papers to photo-
graph him standing there in the shade of the great old
willows, looking at the plain, well-kept tombstone:

67

Laia Asieo Odo
698-769
To be whole is to be part;

true voyage is return.

He was taken to Rodarred, the seat of the Council of
World Governments, to address the plenary council of
that body. He had hoped to meet or at least see aliens
there, the ambassadors from Terra or from Hain, but the
schedule of events was too tightly planned to permit thnT
He had worked hard on his speech, a plea for free com-
munication and mutual recognition between the New
Worid and the Old. It was received with a ten-minute
standing ovation. The respectable weeklies commented on
it with approval, calling it a "disinterested moral gesture of
human brotherhood by a great scientist," but they did not
quote from it, not did the popular papers. In fact, despite
the ovation, Shevek had the curious feeling that nobody
had heard it.

He was given many privileges and entrees: to the Light
Research Laboratories, the National Archives, the Nuclear
Technology Laboratories, the National Library in N10,
the Accelerator in Mealed, the Space Research Founda-
tion in Drio. Though everything he saw on Urras made
him want to see more, still several weeks of the tourist life
was enough: it was all so fascinating, startling, and mar-
velous that at last it became quite overwhelming. He
wanted to settle down at the University and work and
think it all over for a while. But for a last day's sight-
seeing he asked to be shown around the Space Research
Foundation. Pae looked very pleased when he made this
request.

Much that he had seen recently was awesome to him
because it was so old, centuries old, even millennia. The
Foundation, on the contrary, was new: built within the
last ten years, in the lavish, elegant style of the times. The
architecture was dramatic. Great masses of color were
used. Heights and distances were exaggerated. The
laboratories were spacious and airy, the attached factories
and machine shops were housed behind splendid Neo-
Saetan porticos of arches and columns. The hangars were
huge multicolored domes, translucent and fantastic. The
men who worked there were, in contrast, very quiet and
68

solid. They took Shevek away from his usual escorts and
showed him through the whole Foundation, including
every stage of the experimental interstellar propulsion
system they were working on, from the computers and the
drawing boards to a half-finished ship. enormous and sur-
real m the orange, violet, and yellow light within the vast
geodesic hangar.

"You have so much," Shevek said to the engineer who
bad taken charge of him, a man named Oegeo. "You
have so much to work with, and you work with it so
well. This is magnificent—the coordination, the coopera-
tion, the greatness of the enterprise."

"Couldn't swing anything on this scale where you come
from, eh?" the engineer said, grinning.

"Spaceships? Our space fleet is the ships the Settlers
came in from Urras—built here on Urras—nearly two
centuries ago. To build just a ship to carry grain across
the sea, a barge, it takes a year's planning, a big effort of
our economy."

Oegeo nodded. "Well, we've got the goods, all right.
But you know, you're the man who can tell us when to
scrap this whole job—throw it all away."

'Throw it away? What do you mean?"

"Faster than light travel," Oegeo said. "Transilience. The
old physics says it isn't possible. The Terrans say it isnt
possible. But the Hainish, who after all invented the drive
we use now, say that it is possible, only they dont know
how to do it, because they're just learning temporal
physics from us. Evidently if it's in anybody's pocket,
anybody in the known worlds. Dr. Shevek, it's in yours."

Shevek looked at him with a distancing stare, his light
eyes hard and dear. "I am a theoretician, Oegeo. Not a
designer."

"If you provide the theory, the unification of Sequency
and Simultaneity in a general field theory of time, then
weTl design the ships. And arrive on Terra, or Hain, or
the next galaxy, in the instant we leave Urras! This tub,"
and he looked down the hangar at the looming framework
of the half-built ship swimming in shafts of violet and
orange light, "will be as outdated as an oxcart."

"You dream as you build, superbly," Shevek said, still
withdrawn and stem. There was much more that Oegeo
and the others wanted to show him and discuss with him,
69

but before long he said, with a simplicity that precluded
any ironic intention, "I think you had better take me
back to the keepers."

They did so; they bade farewell with mutual warmth.
Shevek got into the car, and then got out again. "I was
forgetting," he said, "is there time to see one other thing
in Drio?"

"There isn't anything else in Drio," Pae said, polite as
ever and trying hard to hide his annoyance over ShevA's
five-hour escapade among the engineers.

"I should like to see the fort"

"What fort, sir?"

"An old castle, from the times of the kings. It was
used later as a prison."

"Anything like that would have been torn down. The
Foundation rebuilt the town entirely."

When they were in the car and the chauffeur was
closing the doors, Chifoilisk (another probable source of
Pae's ill humor) asked, **What did you want to see another
castle for, Shevek? Should have thought you'd had enough
old ruins to hold you for a while."

"The Fort in Drio was where Odo spent nine years,"
Shevek replied. His face was set, as it had been since he
talked with Oegeo. "After the Insurrection of 747. She
wrote the Prison Letters there, and the Analogy."

"Afraid it's been pulled down," Pae said sympathetically.
"Drio was a moribund sort of town, and the Foundation
just wiped out and started fresh."

•Shevek nodded. But as the car followed a riverside
highway toward the tumoff to leu Eun it passed a bluff
on the curve of the river Seisse, and up on the bluff there
was a building, heavy, ruinous, implacable, with broken
towers of black stone. Nothing could have been less like
the gorgeous lighthearted buildings of the Space Research
Foundation, the showy domes, the bright factories, the
tidy lawns and paths. Nothing could have made them look
so much like bits of colored paper.

"That, I believe, is the Fort," Chifoilisk remarked with
his usual satisfaction at placing the tactless remark where
it was least wanted.

"Gone all to ruins," Pae said. "Must be empty."

"Want to stop and have a look at it, Shevek?" Chifoilisk
asked, ready to tap on the chauffeur's screen.
70

"No," Shevek said.

He had seen what he wanted to see. There was still a
Fort in Drio. He did not need to enter it and seek down
ruined halls for the cell in which Odo had spent nine
years. He knew what a prison cell was like.

He looked up, his face still set and cold, at the ponder-
ous dark walls that now loomed almost above the car. I
have been here for a long time, the fort said, and I am
still here.

When he was back in ha rooms, after dinner in the
Senior Faculty Refectory, he sat down alone by the
unlighted fire. It was summer in A-lo, getting on towards
the longest day of the year, and though it was past eight it
was not yet dark. The sky outside the arched windows
still showed a tinge of the daylight color of the sky, a
pure tender blue. The air was mild, fragrant of cut grass
and wet earth. There was a light in the chapel, across the
grove, and a faint undertone of music on that lightly
stirring air. Not the birds singing, but a human music.
Shevek listened. Somebody was practicing the Numerical
Harmonies on the chapel harmonium. They were as
familiar to Shevek as to any Urrasti, Odo had not tried
to renew the basic relationships of music, when she re-
newed the relationships of men. She had always respected
the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws
of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony
along.

The large, calm room was shadowy and silent, darken-
ing. Shevek looked around it, the perfect double arches
of the windows, the faintly gleaming edges of the parquet
floor, the strong, dim curve of the stone chimney, the
paneled walls, admirable in their proportion. It was a
beautiful and humane room. It was a very old room. This
Senior Faculty House, they told him, had been built in the
year 540, four hundred years ago, two hundred and thirty
years before the Settlement of Anarres. Generations of
scholars had lived, worked, talked, thought, slept, died in
this room before Odo was ever born. The Numerical
Harmonies had drifted over the lawn, through the dark
leaves of the grove, for centuries. I have been here for a
long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here.
What are you doing here?

He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and
71

bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work,
the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Paradise is
for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was
a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their
past, their history. The settlers of Anarres had turned
their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the
future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past,
the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve.
The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong. WTOM in
their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo
the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come
back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an
explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are bom in
exile.

He had come to love Urras, but what good was his
yearning love? He was not part of it. Nor was he part of
the world of his birth.

The loneliness, the certainty of isolation, that he had
felt in his first hour aboard the Mindful, rose up in him
and asserted itself as his true condition, ignored, sup-
pressed, but absolute.

He was alone, here, because he came from a self-
exiled society. He had alwavs been alone on his own
world because he had exiled himself from his society.
The Settlers had taken one step away. He had taken two.
He stood by himself, because he had taken the meta-
physical risk.

And he had been fool enough to think that he might
serve to bring together two worlds to which he did not
belong.

The blue of the night sky outside the windows drew
his eyes. Over the vague darkness of foliage and the tower
of the chapel, above the dark line of the hills, which at
night always seemed smaller and more remote, a light
was growing, a large, soft radiance. Moonrise, he thought,
with a grateful sense of familiarity. There is no break in
the wholeness of time. He had seen the Moon rise when
he was a little child, from the window of the domicile in
Wide Plains, with Palat; over the hills of his boyhood;

over the dry plains of the Dust; over the roofs of Abbe-
nay, with Takver watching it beside him.

But it had not been this Moon.
72

The shadows moved about him, but he sat unmoving
as Anarres rose above the alien hills, at her full, mottled
dun and bluish-white, lambent The light of his world
filled his empty hands.

73

Chapter 4




The westering sun shining in on his face woke Shevek
as the dirigible, clearing the last high pass of the Ne
Theras, turned due south. He had slept most of the day,
the third of the long journey. The night of the farewell
party was half a world behind him. He yawned and
rubbed his eyes and shook his head, trying to shake the
deep rumble of the dirigible engine out of his ears, and
then came wide awake, realizing that the journey was
nearly over, that they must be coming close to Abbenay.
He pressed his face to the dusty window, and sure enough,
down there between two low rusty ridges was a great
walled field, the Port. He gazed eagerly, trying to see if
there was a spaceship on the pad. Despicable as Urras was,
still it was another world; he wanted to see a ship from
another world, a voyager across the dry and terrible
abyss, a thing made by alien hands. But there was no ship

in the Port.

The freighters from Urras came in only eight times
a year, and stayed just long enough to load and unload.
They were not welcome visitors. Indeed they were, to
some Anarresti, a perpetually renewed humiliation.

They brought fossil oils and petroleum products, cer-
tain delicate machine parts and electronic components that
74

Anarresti manufacturing was not geared to supply, and
often a new strain of fruit tree or grain for testing.
They took back to Urras a full load of mercury, copper,
aluminum, uranium, tin, and gold. It was, for them, &
very good bargain. The division of their cargoes eight
times a year was the most prestigious function of the
Urrasti Council of World Governments and the major
event of the Urrasti world stock market. In fact, thai
Free World of Anarres was a mining colony of Urras.

The fact galled. Every generation, every year, in tha
PDC debates in Abbenay, fierce protests were made)
"Why do we continue these profiteering business trans-
actions with warmaking propertarians?" And cooler heads
always gave the same answer: "It would cost the Urrasti
more to dig the ores themselves; therefore they don't
invade us. But if we broke the trade agreement, they
would use force." It is hard, however, for people who
have never paid money for anything to understand the
psychology of cost, the argument of the marketplace.
Seven generations of peace had not brought trust.

Therefore the work-posting called Defense never had to
call for volunteers. Most Defense work was so boring that
it was not called work in Pravic, which used the same
word for work and play, but kleggich, drudgery. Defense
workers manned the twelve old interplanetary ships, keep-
ing them repaired and in orbit as a guard network; main-
tained radar and radio-telescopic scans in lonesome places;

did dull duty at the Port. And yet they always had a
waiting-list. However pragmatic the morality a young
Anarresti absorbed, yet life overflowed in him, demand-
ing altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture.
Loneliness, watchfulness, danger, spaceships: they offered
the lure of romance. It was pure romance that kept:

Shevek flattening his nose against the window until the
vacant Port had dropped away behind the dirigible, and
that left him disappointed because he had not seen a grub-
by ore freighter on the pad.

He yawned again, and stretched, and then looked out,
ahead, to see what was to be seen. The dirigible wa»
clearing the last low ridge of the Ne Theras. Before i4
stretching out southward from the mountains' arms, bril-
liant in the afternoon sunlight, lay a great sloping bay of
green.

75

He looked at it with wonder, as his ancestors, six
thousand years ago, had looked at it.

In the third Millennium on Urras the astronomer-
priests of Serdonou and Dhun had watched the seasons-
change the tawny brightness of the Otherworid, and had
given mystical names to the plains and ranges and sun-
reflecting seas. One region that grew green before all
others in the lunar new year they called ADS Hos, the f
Garden of Mind: the Eden of Anarres.

In later millennia telescopes had proved them to be
quite correct. Acs Hos was indeed the most favored spot
on Anarres; and the first manned ship to the Moon had
come down there in the green place between the moun-
tains and the sea.

But the Eden of Anarres proved to be dry, cold, and
windy, and the rest of the planet was worse. Life there
had not evolved higher than fish and flowerless plants.
The air was thin, like the air of Urras at a very high
altitude. The sun burned, the wind froze, the dust choked.

For two hundred years after the first landing Anarres
was explored, mapped, investigated, but not colonized.
Why move to a howling desert when there was plenty
of room in the gracious valleys of Urras?

But it was mined. The self-plundering eras of the Ninth
and early Tenth Millennia had left the lodes of Urras
empty; and as rocketry was perfected, it became cheaper
to mine the Moon than to extract needed metals from
low-grade ores or sea water. In the Urrasti year DC-738
a settlement was founded at the foot of the Ne Thera
Mountains, where mercury was mined, in the old Ans
Hos. They called the place Anarres Town. It was not a
town, there were no women. Men signed on for two or
three years' duty as miners or technicians, then went
home to the real world.

The Moon and its mines were under the jurisdiction
of the Council of World Governments, but around in
the Moon's eastern hemisphere the nation of Thu had a
little secret: a rocket base and a settlement of goldroiners,
with their wives and children. They really lived on the
Moon, but nobody knew it except their government. It
was the collapse of that government in the year 771
that led to the proposal, in the Council of World Govern-
ments, of giving the Moon to the International Society of
76

Odonians—buying them off with a world, before they
fatally undermined the authority of law and national
sovereignty on Urras. Anarres Town was evacuated, and
from the midst of the turmoil in Thu a couple of hasty
final rockets were sent to pick up the goldminers. Not all
of them chose to return. Some of them liked the howling
desert.

For over twenty years the twelve ships granted to the
Odonian Settlers by the Council of World Governments
went back and forth between the worlds, until the million
souls who chose the new life had all been brought across
the dry abyss. Then the port was closed to immigration
and left open only to the freight ships of the Trade Agree-
ment. By then Anarres Town held a hundred thousand
people, and had been renamed Abbenay, which meant,
in the new language of the new society. Mind.

Decentralization had been an essential element in Odo's
plans for the society she did not live to see founded. She
had no intention of trying to de-urbanize civilization.
Though she suggested that the natural limit to the size
of a community lay in its dependence on its own
immediate region for essential food and power, she in-
tended that all communities be connected by communica-
tion and transportation networks, so that goods and ideas
could get where they were wanted, and the administration
of things might work with speed and ease, and no corn-
munity should be cut off from change and interchange.
But the network was not to be run from the top down.
There was to be no controlling center, no capital, no
establishment for the self-perpetuating machinery of
bureaucracy and the dominance drive of individuals seek-
ing to become captains, bosses, chiefs of state.

Her plans, however, had been based on the generous
ground of Urras. On arid Anarres, the communities had
to scatter widely in search of resources, and few of them
could be self-supporting, no matter how they cut back
their notions of what is needed for support. They cut back
very hard indeed, but to a minin^iin beneath which they
would not go; they would not regress to pre-urban, pre-
technologlcal tribalism. They knew that their anarchism
was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex
diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly in-
dustrialized technology that could maintain high produc-
77

tion and rapid transportation of goods. However vast the

distances separating settlements, they held to the ideal of
complex organicism. They built the roads first, the houses
second. The special resources and products of each region
Were interchanged continually with those of others, in an
intricate process of balance: that balance of diversity
which is the characteristic of life, of natural and social
ecology.                                                ^

But, as they said in the analogic mode, you can't have'
a nervous system without at least a ganglion, and
preferably a brain. There had to be a center. The com-
puters that coordinated the administration of things, the
division of labor, and the distribution of goods, and the
central federatives of most of the work syndicates, were in
Abbenay, right from the start. And from the start the
Settlers were aware that that unavoidable centralization
was a lasting threat, to be countered by lasting vigilance.

0 child Anarchia, infinite promise
infinite carefulness
I listen, listen in the night
by the cradle deep as the night
is it well with the child

Pio Atean, who took the Pravic name Tober, wrote that in
the fourteenth year of the Settlement. The Odonians' first
efforts to make their new language, their new world, into
poetry, were stiff, ungainly, moving.

Abbenay, the mind and center of Anarres. was there,
now, ahead of the dirigible, on the great green plain.

That brilliant, deep green of the fields was unmistak-
able: a color not native to Anarres. Only here and on the
warm shores of the Keran Sea did the Old World grains
flourish. Elsewhere the staple grain crops were ground-
holum and pale mene-grass.

When Shevek was nine his afternoon schoolwork for
several months had been caring for the ornamental plants
in Wide Plains community—delicate exotics, that had to
be fed and sunned like babies. He had assisted an old
man in the peaceful and exacting task, had liked him
and liked the plants, and the dirt, and the work. When
he saw the color of the Plain of Abbenay he remem-
bered the old man, and the smell of fish-oil manure, and
78

the color of the first leafbuds on small bare branches, that
clear vigorous green.

He saw in the distance among the vivid fields a long
Smudge of white, which broke into cubes, like spilt salt, as
the dirigible came over.

A cluster of dazzling flashes at the east edge of the city
made him wink and see dark spots for a moment: the big
parabolic mirrors that provided solar heat for Abbenay's
refineries.

The dirigible came down at a cargo depot at the south
end of town, and Shevek set off into the streets of the
biggest city in the world.

They were wide, clean streets. They were shadowless,
for Abbenay lay less than thirty degrees north of the
equator, and all the buildings were low, except the strong,
spare towers of the wind turbines. The sun shone white in
a hard, dark, blue-violet sky. The air was clear and
clean, without smoke or moisture. There was a vividness'
to things, a hardness of edge and comer, a clarity. Every-
thing stood out separate, itself.

The elements that made up Abbenay were the same as
in any other Odonian community, repeated many times:

workshops, factories, domiciles, dormitories, learning
centers, meeting halls, distributories, depots, refectories.
The bigger buildings were most often grouped around
open squares, giving the city a basic cellular texture: it
was one subcommunity or neighborhood after another.
Heavy industry and food-processing plants tended to
cluster on the city's outskirts, and the cellular pattern was
repeated in that related industries often stood side by
side on a certain square or street The first such that
Shevek walked through was a series of squares, the textile
district, full of holum-fiber processing plants, spinning and
weaving mills, dye factories, and cloth and clothing dis-
tributories; the center of each square was planted with a
little forest of poles strung from top to bottom with
banners and pennants of all the colors of the dyer's art,
proudly proclaiming the local industry. Most of the city's
buildings were pretty much alike, plain, soundly built of
stone or cast foamstone. Some of them looked very large
to Shevek's eyes, but they were almost all of one storey
only, because of the frequency of earthquake. For the
same reason windows were small, and of a tough silicon
79

plastic that did not shatter. They were small, but there
were a lot of them, for there was no artificial lighting
provided from an hour before sunrise to an hour after
sunset. No heat was furnished when the outside tempera-
tare went above 55 degrees Fahrenheit. It was not that
Abbenay was short of power, not with her wind turbines
and the earth temperature-differential generators used foL
heating; but the principle of organic economy was too
essential to the functioning of the society not to affect
ethics and aesthetics profoundly. "Excess is excrement,"
Odo wrote in the Analogy. "Excrement retained in the
body is a poison."

Abbenay was poisonless: a bare city, bright, the colors
light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet You could see
it all, laid out as plain as spilt salt.
Nothing was hidden.

The squares, the austere streets, the low buildings, the
unwalled workyards, were charged with vitality and
activity. As Shevek walked he was constantly aware of
other people walking, working, talking, faces passing,
voices calling, gossiping, singing, people alive, people doing
things, people afoot Workshops and factories fronted on
squares or on their open yards, and their doors were open.
He passed a glassworks, the workman dipping up a great
molten blob as casually as a cook serves soup. Next to it
was a busy yard where foamstone was cast for con-
struction. The gang foreman, a big woman in a smock
white with dust, was supervising the pouring of a cast
with a loud and splendid flow of language. After that came
a small wire factory, a district laundry, a luthier's where
musical instruments were made and repaired, the district
small-goods distributory, a theater, a tile works. The
activity going on in each place was fascinating, and most-
ly out in full view. Children were around, some involved
in the work with the adults, some underfoot making mud-
pies, some busy with games in the street, one sitting
perched up on the roof of the learning center with her nose
deep in a book. The wiremaker had decorated the
shopfront with patterns of vines worked in painted wire,
cheerful and ornate. The blast of steam and conversation
from the wide-open doors of the laundry was over-
whelming- No doors were locked, few shut. There were
no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all
80

(he work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to
the hand. And every now and then down Depot Street
a thing came careering by clanging a bell, a vehicle
crammed full of people and with people festooned on
stanchions all over the outside, old women cursing
heartily as it failed to slow down at their stop so they
could scramble off, a little boy on a homemade tricycle
pursuing it madly, electric sparks showering blue from
the overhead wires at crossings: as if that quiet intense
vitality of the streets built up every now and then to dis-
charge point, and leapt the gap with a crash and a blue
crackle and the smell of ozone. These were the Abbenay
omnibuses, and as they passed one felt like cheering.

Depot Street ended in a large airy place where five
other streets rayed in to a triangular park of grass and
trees. Most parks on Anarres were playgrounds of dirt
or sand, with a stand of shrub and tree holums. This one
was different Shevek crossed the trafficless pavement and
entered the park, drawn to it because he had seen it often
in pictures, and because he wanted to see alien trees,
Urrasti trees, from close up, to experience the greenness
of those multitudinous leaves. The sun was setting, the
sky was wide and clear, darkening to purple at the zenith,
the dark of space showing through the thin atmosphere.
He entered under the trees, alert, wary. Were they not
wasteful, those crowding leaves? The tree holum got along
very efficiently with spines and needles, and no excess of
those. Wasn't all this extravagant foliage mere excess,
excrement? Such trees couldn't thrive without a rich soil,
constant watering, much care. He disapproved of their
lavishness, their thrifdessness. He walked under them,
among them. The alien grass was soft underfoot. It was
like walking on living flesh. He shied back onto the path.
The dark limbs of the trees reached out over his head,
holding their many wide green hands above him. Awe
came into him- He knew himself blessed though he had
not asked for blessing.

Some way before him, down the darkening path, a per-
son sat reading on a stone bench.

Shevek went forward slowly. He came to the bench
and stood looking at the figure who sat with head bowed
over the book in the green-gold dusk under the trees. It
was a woman of fifty or sixty, strangely dressed, her hair
81

pulled back in a knot. Her left hand on her chin nearly
hid the stern mouth, her right held the papers on her
knee. They were heavy, those papers; the cold hand on
them was heavy. The light was dying fast but she never
looked up. She went on reading the proof sheets of The
Social Organism.

Shevek looked at Odo for a while, and then he sat
down on the bench beside her.                       w

He had no concept of status at all, and there was
plenty of room on the bench. He was moved by a pure
impulse of companionship.

He looked at the strong, sad profile, and at the hands,
an old woman's hands. He looked up into the shadowy
branches. For the first time in his life he comprehended
that Odo, whose face he had known since his infancy,
whose ideas were central and abiding in his mind and the
mind of everyone he knew, that Odo had never set foot
on Anarres: that she had lived, and died, and was
buried, in the shadow of green-leaved trees, in unimagin-
able cities, among people speaking unknown languages, on
another world. Odo was an alien: an exile.

The young man sat beside the statue in the twilight,
one almost as quiet as the other.

At last, realizing it was getting dark, he got up and
made off into the streets again, asking directions to the
Central Institute of the Sciences.

It was not far; he got there not long after the lights
went on. A registrar or vigilkeeper was in the little office
at the entrance, reading. He had to knock at the open
door to get her attention. "Shevek," he said. It was cus-
tomary to start conversation with a stranger by offering
your name as a kind of handle for him to take hold of.
There were not many other handles to offer. There was
no rank, no terms of rank, no conventional respectful
forms or address.

"Kokvan," the woman responded. "Weren't you expect-
ing to get in yesterday?"

"They've changed the cargo-dirigible schedule. Is there
an empty bed in one of the dorms?"

"Number 46 is empty. Across the courtyard, the build-
ing to the left. There's a note for you here from Sabul.
He says call on him in the morning at the physics office."

"Thanksl" said Shevek, and strode off across the broad
82

paved courtyard swinging his luggage—a winter coat and
a spare pair of boots—in his hand. Lights were on in
rooms all round the quadrangle. There was a murmur,
a presence of people in the quietness. Something stirred
in the dear, keen air of the city night, a sense of drama,
of promise.

Dinner hour was not over, and he made a quick detour
by the Institute refectory to see if there was some spare
food for a drop-in. He found that his name had already
been put on the regular list, and he found the food excel-
lent. There was even a dessert, stewed preserved fruit
Shevek loved sweets, and as he was one of the last diners
and there was plenty of fruit left over, he took a second
dish. He ate alone at a small table. At larger tables nearby
groups of young people were talking over their empty
plates; he overheard discussions on the behavior of argon
at very low temperatures, the behavior of a chemistry
teacher at a colloquium, the putative curvatures of
time. A couple of people glanced at him; they did not
come speak to him, as people in a small community
would speak to a stranger; their glance was not unfriendly,
• perhaps a little challenging.

He found Room 46 in a long corridor of shut doors
in the domicile. Evidently they were all singles, and he
wondered why the registrar had sent him there. Since he
was two years old he had always lived in dormitories,
rooms of four to ten beds. He knocked at the door of
46. Silence. He opened the door. The room was a small
single, empty, dimly illuminated by the light in the
corridor. He lighted the lamp. Two chairs, a desk, a well-
used slide rule, a few books, and, folded neatly on the bed
platform, a hand-woven orange blanket. Somebody else
lived here, the registrar had made a mistake. He shut the
door. He opened it again to turn off the lamp. On the
desk under the lamp was a note, scribbled on a torn-off
scrap of paper: "Shevek, Physics off. morning. 2-4-1-
154. SabuL"

He put his coat down on a chair, his boots on the floor.
He stood awhile and read the titles of the books, standard
references in physics and mathematics, green-bound, the
Circle of Life stamped on the covers. He hung his coat in
the closet and put his boots away. He drew the curtain
of the closet carefully. He crossed the room to the door:

83

four paces. He stood there hesitant a minute longer, and
then, for the first time in his life. he closed the door of his
own room.

Sabul was a small, stocky, slovenly man of forty. fEs
facial hair was darker and coarser than common, and
thickened to a regular beard on his chin. He wore a heay
winter overtunic, and from the look of it had worn it since
last winter; the ends of the sleeves were black with grime.
His manner was abrupt and grudging. He spoke in scraps,
as he scribbled notes on scraps. He growled. "You've got
to leam lotic," he growled at Shevek.

"Leam lotic?"

"I said learn lotic."

"What for?"

"So you can read Urrasti physics! Atro, To. Baisk,
those men. Nobody's translated it into Pravic, nobody's
likely to. Six people, maybe, on Anarres are capable of
understanding it. In any language."

"How can I leam lotic?'*

"Grammar and a dictionary!"

Shevek stood his ground. "Where do I find them?"

"Here," Sabul growled. He rummaged among the untidy
shelves of small green-bound books. His movements were
brusque and irritable. He located two thick, unbound
volumes on a bottom shelf and slapped them down on the
desk. 'Tell me when you're competent to read Atro in
lotic. Nothing I can do with you till then."

"What kind of mathematics do these Urrasti use?"

"Nothing you can't handle."

"Is anybody working here in chronotopology?"

"Yes, Turet You can consult him. You don't need his
lecture course."

"I planned to attend Ovarab's lectures."

"What for?"

"Her work in frequency and cycle—"

Sabul sat down and got up again- He was unbearably
restless, restless yet rigid, a woodrasp of a man. "Don't
waste time. You're far beyond the old woman in Sequency
theory, and the other ideas she spouts are trash."

"I'm interested in Simultaneity principles."

"Simultaneityl What kind of profiteering crap is Mitis
84

feeding you up there?" The physicist glared, the veins on
his temples bulging under the coarse, short hair.

"I organized a joint-work course in it myself."

"Grow up. Grow up. Time to grow up- You're here
now. We're working on physics here, not religion. Drop the
mysticism and grow up. How soon can you leam lotic?"

"It took me several years to leam Pravic," Shevek said.
His mild irony passed Sabul by completely.

"I did it in ten decads. Well enough to read To'»
Introduction. Oh, hell, you need a text to work on. Might
as well be that Here. Wait" He hunted through an over-
flowing drawer and finally achieved a book, a queer-look-
ing book, bound in blue, without the Circle of Life on the
cover. The title was stamped in gold letters and seemed
to say Poilea Afiff-ite^ which didn't make any sense, and
the shapes of some of the letters were unfamiliar. Shevek
stared at it, took it from Sabul, but did not open it. He
was holding it, the thing he had wanted to see, the alien
artifact, the message from another world.

He remembered the book Palat had shown him, the
book of numbers.

"Come back when you can read that," Sabul growled.

Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growl: "Keep
those books with youl They're not for general consump-
tion."

The young man paused, turned back, and said after a
moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, "I don't under-
stand."

"Don't let anybody else read theml"

Shevek made no response.

Sabul got up again and came close to him. "Listen.
You're now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences.
a Physics syndic, working with roe, Sabul. You follow
that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?"

"I'm to acquire knowledge which I'm not to share,**
Shevek said after a brief pause, stating the sentence as if
it were a proposition in logic.

"If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street
would you 'share' them with every kid that went by? Those
books are explosives. Now do you follow me?"

"Yes."

"All right." Sabul turned away, scowling with what
appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek
85

left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and
devouring curiosity.

He set to work to leam lotic. He worked alone in
Room 46, because of Sabul's warning, and because it came
only too naturally to him to work alone.

Since he was very young he had known that in certain
ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a cVId
the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since,
having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing
anything, he cannot Justify it. The reliable and affectionate
presence of adults who are also, in their own way, differ-
ent, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and
Shevek had not had it His father had indeed been utterly
reliable and affectionate. Whatever Shevek was and what-
ever he did, Palat approved and was loyal. But Palat
had not had this curse of difference. He was like the
others, like all the others to whom community came so
easy. He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what
freedom is, that recognition of each person's solitude which
alone transcends it.

Shevek was therefore used to an inward isolation,
buffered by au the daily casual contacts and exchanges
of communal life and by the companionship of a few
friends. Here in Abbenay he had no friends, and because
he was not thrown into the dormitory situation he made
none. He was too conscious, at twenty, of the peculiarities
of his mind and character to be outgoing; he was with-
drawn and aloof; and his fellow students, sensing that
the aloofness was real, did not often try to approach
him.

The privacy of his room soon became dear to him. He
savored his total independence. He left the room only for
breakfast and dinner at the refectory and a quick daily
hike through the city streets to appease his muscles,
which had always been used to exercise; then back to
Room 46 and the grammar of lotic. Once every decad or
two he was called on for "tenth-day" rotational community
labor, but the people he worked with were strangers, not
close acquaintances as they would have been in a small
community, so that these days of manual work made no
psychological interruption to his isolation, or to his
progress in lotic.

The grammar itself, being complex, illogical, and pat-
86

temed. gave him pleasure. His learning went fast once he
had built up the basic vocabulary, for he knew what he
was reading; he knew the field and the terms, and when-
ever he got stuck either his own intuition or a mathemati-
cal equation would show him where he had got to. They
were not always places he had been before. To's Intro-
duction to Temporal Physics was no beginner's handbook.
By the time he had worked his way to the middle of the"
book Shevek was no longer reading lotic, he was reading
physics; and he understood why Sabul had had him read
the Urrasti physicists before he did anything else. They
were far ahead of anything that had been done on Anarres
for twenty or thirty years. The most brilliant insights of
Sabul's own works on Sequency were in fact translations
from the lotic, unacknowledged.

He plunged on through the other books Sabul doled
out to him, the major works of contemporary Urrasti
physics. His life grew even more hermitic. He was not
active in the student syndicate, and did not attend the
meetings of any other syndicates or federatives except the
lethargic Physics Federation. The meetings of such groups,
the vehicles of both social action and sociability, were
the framework of life in any small community, but here
in the city they seemed much less important. One was not
necessary to them; there were always others ready to
run things, and doing it well enough. Except for tenth-
day duties and the usual janitorial assignments in his
domicile and the laboratories, Shevek's time was entirely
his own. He often omitted exercise and occasionally meay.
However, he never missed the one course he was attend-
ing, Gvarab's lecture group on Frequency and Cycle.

Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and
maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and
uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears
as her one constant auditor- She began to lecture for
him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied
her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the
vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room
looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had
the wits to be scared. Gvarab saw a much larger universe
than most people were capable of seeing, and it made
them blink. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In
his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had
87

offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared
with her, he took, he shared. He was her brother, across
the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption.

When they met in the physics offices or the refectory
sometimes they fell straight to talking physics, but at
other times Gvarab's energy was insufficient for that, and
then they found little to say, for the old woman was as
shy as the young man. "You don't eat enough," she would
tell him. He would smile and his ears would get reo.
Neither knew what else to say.

After he had been a half year at the Institute, Shevek
gave Sabul a three-page thesis entitled "A Critique of
Atro's Infinite Sequency Hypothesis." Sabul returned it to
him after a decad, growling, "Translate it into lotic."

"I wrote it mostly in lotic to start with." Shevek said,
"since I was using Atro's terminology. Ill copy out the
original. What for?"

"What for? So that damned profiteer Atro can read
iti There's a ship in on the fifth of next decad."

"A ship?"

"A freighter from Urrasi"

Thus Sbevek discovered that not only petroleum and
mercury went back and forth between the sundered
worlds, and not only books, such as the books he had
been reading, but also letters. Letters! Letters to proper-
tarians, to subjects of governments founded on the in-
equity of power, to individuals who were inevitably
exploited by and exploiters of others, because they had
consented to be elements in the State-Machine. Did such
people actually exchange ideas with free people in a
nonaggressive, voluntary manner? Could they really admit
equality and participate in intellectual solidarity, or were
they merely trying to dominate, to assert their power, to
possess? The idea of actually exchanging letters with a
propertarian alarmed him, but it would be interesting to
find out. •.

So many such discoveries had been forced on him dur-
ing his first half year in Abbenay that he had to realize
that he had been—and possibly still was?—very naive:

not an easy admission for an intelligent young man to
make.

The first, and still the least acceptable, of these
discoveries was that he was supposed to learn lotic but
88

keep his knowledge to himself: a situation so new to him
and morally so confusing that he had not yet worked it
out. Bvidently he did not exactly harm anybody by not
sharing his knowledge with them. On the other hand
what conceivable harm could it do them to know that he
knew lotic, and that they could learn it too? Surely free-
dom lay rather in openness than in secrecy, and freedom
is always worth the risk. He could not see what the risk
was, anyway. It occurred to him once that Sabul wanted
to keep the new Urrasti physics private—to own it, as a
property, a source of power over his colleagues on Anar-
res. But this idea was so counter to Shevek's habits of
thinking that it had great difficulty getting itself clear in
his mind, and when it did he suppressed it at once, with
contempt, as a genuinely disgusting thought.

Then there was the private room, another moral thorn.
As a child, if you slept alone in a single it meant you had
bothered the others in the dormitory until they wouldn't
tolerate you; you had egoized. Solitude equated with
disgrace. In adult terms, the principal referent for single
rooms was a sexual one. Every domicile had a number of
singles, and a couple that wanted Ip copulate used one of
these free singles for a night, or a decad, or as long as
they liked. A couple undertaking partnership took a
double room; in a small town where no double was
available, they often built one on to the end of a domicile,
and long, low, straggling buildings might thus be created
room by room, called "partners' truck trains." Aside from
sexual pairing there was no reason for not sleeping in a
dormitory. You could choose a small one or a large one,
and if you didn't like your roommates, you could move to
another dormitory. Everybody had the workshop, labora-
tory, studio, barn or office that he needed for his work;

one could be as private or as public as one chose in the
baths; sexual privacy was freely available and socially
expected; and beyond that privacy was not functional.
It was excess, waste. The economy of Anarres would not
support the building, maintenance, heating, lighting of
individual houses and apartments. A person whose nature
was genuinely unsociable had to get away from society
and look after himself. He was completely free to do so.
He could build himself a house wherever he liked
(though if it spoiled a good view or a fertile bit of land
89

he might find himself under heavy pressure from his
neighbors to move elsewhere). There were a good many
solitaries and hermits on the fringes of the older Anarresti
communities, pretending that they were not members of a
social species. But for those who accepted the privilege and
obligation of human solidarity, privacy was a value only
where it served a function.

Shevek's first reaction to being put in a private room,
then, was half disapproval and half shame. Why had- ibVy
stuck him in here? He soon found out why. It was the
right kind of place for his kind of work. If ideas arrived
at midnight, he could turn on the light and write them
down; if they came at dawn, they weren't jostled out of
his head by the conversation and commotion of four or
five roommates getting up; if they didn't come at all and he
had to spend whole days sitting at his desk staring out
the window, there was nobody behind his back to wonder
why he was slacking. Privacy, in fact, was almost as
desirable for physics aa it was for sex. But all the same,

•was it necessary?

There was always a dessert at the Institute refectory
at dinner. Shevek enjoyed it very much, and when there

•were extras he took them. And his conscience, his organic-
societal conscience, got indigestion. Didn't everybody at
every refectory, from Abbenay to Uttermost, get the
same, share and share alike? He had always been told so
and had always found it so. Of course there were local
variations: regional specialties, shortages, surpluses, make-
ishifts in situations such as Project Camps, poor cooks,
good cooks, in fact an endless variety within the unchang-
ing framework. But no cook was so talented that he could
make a dessert without the makings. Most refectories
served dessert once or twice a decad. Here it was served
nightly. Why? Were the members of the Central Institute
of the Sciences better than other people?

Shevek did not ask these questions of anyone else. The
Social conscience, the opinion of others, was the most
powerful moral force motivating the behavior of most
Anarresti, but it was a little less powerful in him than in
most of them. So many of his problems were of a kind
other people did not understand that he had got used to
working them out for himself, in silence. So he did with
these problems, which were much harder for him, in some
90

ways, than those of temporal physics. He asked no one's
opinion. He stopped taking dessert at the refectory.

He did not, however, move to a dormitory. He weighed
the moral discomfort against the practical advantage, and
found the latter heavier. He worked better in the private
room. The job was worth doing and he was doing it well.
It was centrally functional to his society. The responsi-
bility justified the privilege,

So he worked.

He lost weight; he walked light on the earth. Lack of
physical labor, lack of variety of occupation, lack of
social and sexual intercourse, none of these appeared to
him as lacks, but as freedom. He was the free man: he
could do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it
for as long as he wanted to do it And he did. He worked.
He work/played.

He was sketching out notes for a series of hypotheses
which led to a coherent theory of Simultaneity. But that
began to seem a petty goal; there was a much greater
one, a unified theory of Time, to be reached, if he could
jost get to it. He felt that he was in a locked room in the
middle of a great open country: it was all around him, if
he could find the way out, the way clear. The intuition
became an obsession. During that autumn and winter he
got more and more out of the habit of sleeping. A couple
of hours at night and a couple more sometime during the
day were enough for him, and such naps were not the
kind of profound sleep he had always had before, but al-
most a waking on another level, they were so full of
dreams. He dreamed vividly, and the dreams were part
of his work. He saw time turn back upon itself, a river
flowing upward to the spring. He held the contemporaneity
of two moments in his left and right hands; as he moved
them apart he smiled to see the moments separate like
dividing soap bubbles. He got up and scribbled down,
without really waking, the mathematical formula that had
been eluding him for days. He saw space shrink in upon
him like the walls of a collapsing sphere driving in and
in towards a central void, closing, closing, and he woke
with a scream for help locked in his throat, struggling in
silence to escape from the knowledge of his own eternal
emptiness.

On a cold afternoon late in winter he stopped in at the
91

physics office on his way home from the library to see if
there were any letters for him in the pickup box. He had
no reason to expect any, since he had never written any
of his friends at Northsetting Regional; but he hadn't been
feeling very well for a couple of days, he had disproved
some of his own most beautiful hypotheses and brought
himself after half a year's hard work right around to
where he had started from, the phasic model was simcly
too vague to be useful, his throat felt sore, he wisned
there was a letter from somebody he knew, or maybe
somebody in the physics office to say hello to, at least
But nobody was there except Sabul.

"Look here, Shevek."

He looked at the book the older man held out: a thin
book, bound in green, the Circle of Life on the cover. He
took it and looked at the title page: "A Critique of.Atro's
Infinite Sequency Hypothesis." It was his essay, Atro's
acknowledgement and defense, and his reply. It had all
been translated or retranslated into Pravic, and printed by
the PDC presses in Abbenay. There were two authors*
names: Sabul, Shevek.

Sabul craned his neck over the copy Shevek held, and
gloated. His growl became throaty and chuckling. "We've
finished Atro. Finished him, the damned profiteer! Now
let them try to talk about 'puerile imprecision'!" Sabul
had nursed ten years' resentment against the Physics
Review of leu Eun University, which had referred to his
theoretical work as "crippled by provincialism and the
puerile imprecision with which Odonian dogma infects
every area of thought." 'They'll see who's provincial now!"
he said, grinning. In nearly a year's acquaintance Shevek
could not recall having seen him smile.

Shevek sat down across the room, clearing a pile of
papers off a bench to do so; the physics office was of
course communal, but Sabul kept this back room of the
two littered with materials he was using, so that there
never seemed to be quite room for anyone else. Shevek
looked down at the book he still held, then out the window.
He felt, and looked, rather ill. He also looked tense; but
with Sabul he had never been shy or awkward, as he
often was with people whom he would have liked to know.
"I didn't know you were translating it," he said.

'Translated it, edited it. Polished some of the rough-
92

er spots, filled in transitions you'd left out, and so forth.
Couple of decads* work. You should be proud of it, your
ideas to a large extent form the groundwork of the
finished book."

It consisted entirely Shevek's and Atro's ideas.

"Yes," Shevek said. He looked down at his hands.
Presently he said, "I'd like to publish the paper I wrote
this quarter on Reversibility. It ought to go to Atro. It
would interest him. He's still hung up on causation."

"Publish it? Where?"

"In loUc, I meant—on Urras. Send it to Atro, like this
last one, and hell put it in one of the journals there."

"You can't give them a work to publish that hasnt
been printed here."

"But that's what we did with this one. All this, except
my rebuttal, came out in the leu Eun Review—before this
came out here."

"I couldn't prevent that, but why do you think I hurried
this into print? You don't think everybody in PDC ap-
proves of our trading ideas with Urras like this, do you?
Defense insists that every word that leaves here on those
freighters be passed by a PDC-approved expert. And on
top of that, do you think all the provincial physicists who
dont get in on this pipeline to Urras don't begrudge our
using it? Think they aren't envious? There are people
lying in wait, lying in wait for us to make a false step. H
we're ever caught doing it, we'll lose that mail slot on the
Urrasti freighters. You see the picture now?"

"How did the Institute get that mail slot in the first
placer*

"Pegvur's election to the PDC, ten years ago." Pegvur
had been a physicist of moderate distinction. "I've trod
damned carefully to keep it, ever since. See?"

Shevek nodded.

"In any case, Atro doesn't want to read that stuff of
yours. I looked that paper over and gave it back to you
decads ago. When are you going to stop wasting time
on these reactionary theories Gvarab clings to? Can't you
see she's wasted her whole life on 'em? If you keep at it,
you're going to make a fool of yourself. Which, of course,
is your inalienable right. But you're not going to make a
fool of me"

93

''What if I submit the paper for publication here, in
Pravic, then?"

"Waste of time."

Shevek absorbed this with a slight nod. He got up,
lanky and angular, and stood a moment, remote among
his thoughts. The winter light lay harsh on his hair, which
he now wore pulled back in a queue, and his still face.
He came to the desk and took a copy off the little stack
of new books. "I'd like to send one of these to Mffis,"
he said.

'Take all you want. Listen. If you think you know what
you're doing better than I do, then submit that paper to
the Press. You don't need permission! This isnt some kind
of hierarchy, you know! I can't stop you. All I can do is
give you my advice."

"You're the Press Syndicate's consultant on manuscripts
in physics," Shevek said. "I thought I'd save time for
everyone by asking you now."

His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would
not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.

"Save time, what do you mean?" Sabul growled, but
Sabul was also an Odonian: he writhed as if physically
tormented by his own hypocrisy, turned away from
Shevek, turned back to him, and said spitefully, his voice
thick with anger, "Go ahead! Submit the damned thingi
111 declare myself incompetent to give counsel on it. 111
tell them to consult Gvarab. She's the Simultaneity expert.
not I. The mystical gagaisti The universe as a giant harp-
string, oscillating in and out of existence! What note does
it play, by the way? Passages from the Numerical Har-
monies, I suppose? The fact is that I am incompetent—
in other words, unwilling—to counsel PDC or the Press
on intellectual excrement!"

"The work I've done (or you," Shevek said, "is part of
the work I've done following Gvarab's ideas in Simul-
taneity, If you want one, youTI have to stand the other.
Grain grows best in shit, as we say in Northsetting."

He stood a moment, and getting no verbal reply from
Sabul, said goodbye and left.

He knew he had won a battle, and easily, without
apparent violence. But violence had been done.

As Mitis had predicted, he was "Sabul's man." Sabul
had ceased to be a functioning physicist years ago; his
94

high reputation was built on expropriations from other
minds. Shevek was to do the thinking, and Sabul would
take the credit.

Obviously an ethically intolerable situation, which
Shevek would denounce and relinquish. Only he would
not He needed SabuL He wanted to publish what he
wrote and to send it to the men who could understand
it, the Urrasti physicists; he needed their ideas, their
criticism, their collaboration.

So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like
profiteers. It had not been a battle, but a sale. You give
me this and I'll give you that Refuse roe and I'll refuse
you. Sold? Sold! Shevek's career, like the existence of
his society, depended on the continuance of a fundamen-
tal, unadmitted profit contract Not a relationship of
mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship;

not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from
basic dysfunction?

But all I want to do is get the job done, Shevek pleaded
in his mind, as he walked across the mall towards the
domicile quadrangle in the grey, windy afternoon. It's my
duty, it's my joy. it's the purpose of my whole life. The
man I have to work with is competitive, a dominance-
seeker, a profiteer, but I can't change that; if I want to
work, have to work with him.

He thought about Mitis and her warning. He thought
about the Northsetting Institute and the party the night
before he left. It seemed very long ago now, and so
childishly peaceful and secure that he could have wept in
nostalgia. As he passed under the porch of the Life
Sciences Building a girl passing looked sidelong at him,
and he thought that she looked like that girl—what was
her name?—the one with short hair, who had eaten so
many fried cakes the night of the party. He stopped and
turned, but the girl was gone around the comer. Any-
how she had had long hair. Gone, gone, everything gone.
He came out from the shelter of the porch into the wind.
There was a fine rain on the wind, sparse. Rain was sparse
when it fell at all. This was a dry world. Dry, pale,
inimical. "Inimical!" Shevek said out loud in lotic. He
had never heard the language spoken; it sounded very
strange. The rain stung his face like thrown gravel. It
was an inimical rain. His sore throat had been joined by a
95

terrific headache, of which he had only just become aware.
He got to Room 46 and lay down on the bed platform,
which seemed to be much farther down than usual. He
shook, and could not stop shaking. He pulled the orange
blanket up around him and huddled up, trying to sleep,
but he could not stop shaking, because he was under
constant atomic bombardmfcnt from all sides, increasing
as the temperature increased.                       ^

He had never been ill, and never known any phylfcal
discomfort worse than tiredness. Having no idea what a
high fever was like, he thought, during the lucid intervals
of that long night, that he was going insane. Fear of
madness drove him to seek help when day came. He was
too frightened of himself to ask help from his neighbors
on the corridor: he had heard himself raving in the night
He dragged himself to the local clinic, eight blocks away,
the cold streets bright with sunrise spinning solemnly about
him. At the clinic they diagnosed his insanity as a light
pneumonia and told him to go to bed in Ward Two, He
protested. The aide accused him of egoizing and explained
that if he went home a physician would have to go to the
trouble of calling on him there and arranging private
care for him. He went to bed in Ward Two. All the other
people in the ward were old. An aide came and offered
him a glass of water and a pill. "What is it?" Shevek
asked suspiciously. His teeth were chattering again.

"Antipyretic."

"What's that?"

"Bring down the fever."

"I don't need it."

The aide shrugged. "All right," she said, and went on.

Most young Anarresti felt that it was shameful to be
ill: a result of their society's very successful prophylaxy,
and also perhaps a confusion arising from the analogic use
of the words "healthy" and "sick." They felt illness to be
a crime, if an involuntary one. To yield to the criminal
impulse, to pander to it by taking pain relievers, was
immoral. They fought shy of pills and shots. As middle
age and old age came on, most of them changed then-
view. The pain got worse than the shame. The aide gave
the old men in Ward Two their medicine, and they joked
with her. Shevek watched with duD incomprehension.

Later on there was a doctor with an injection needle.
96

"I don't want it," Shevek said. "Stop egoizing," the doctor
said. "Roll over." Shevek obeyed.

Later on there was a woman who held a cup of water
for him, but he shook so much that the water was spilt,
wetting the blanket. "Let me alone," he said. "Who are
you?" She told him, but he did not understand. He told
her to go away, he felt very well. Then he explained to her
why the cyclic hypothesis, though unproductive in itself,
was essential to his approach to a possible theory of Simul-
taneity, a cornerstone. He spoke partly in his own language
and partly in lotic, and wrote the formulas and equations
on a slate with a piece of chalk so that she and the rest of
the group would understand, as he was afraid they would
misunderstand about the cornerstone. She touched his face
and tied his hair back for him. Her hands were cool. He
had never felt anything pleasanter in all his life than the
touch of her hands. He reached out for her hand. She
was not there, she had gone.

A long time later, he was awake. He could breathe.
He was perfectly well. Everything was all right. He felt
disinclined to move. To move would disturb the perfect,
stable moment, the balance of the world. The winter light
along the ceiling was beautiful beyond expression. He lay
and watched it. The old men down the ward were laugh-
ing together, old husky cackling laughs, a beautiful sound.
The woman came in and sat down by his cot He looked
at her and smiled.

"How do you feel?"

*'Newbom. Who are you?"

She also smiled. "The mother."

"Rebirth. But I'm supposed to get a new body, not
the same old one."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Nothing on earth. On Urras. Rebirth is part of their
religion."

"You're still lightheaded." She touched his forehead.
"No fever." Her voice in saying those two words touched
and struck something very deep in Shevek's being, a dark
place, a place walled in, where it reverberated back and
back in the darkness. He looked at the woman and said
with terror, "You are Rulag."

"I told you I was. Several timesi"

She maintained an expression of unconcern, even of
97

humor. There was no question of Shevek*s maintaining
anything. He had no strength to move, but he shrank
away from her in unconcealed fear, as if she were not his
mother, but his death. If she noticed this weak movement,
she gave no sign.

She was a handsome woman, dark, with fine and well-
proportioned features showing no lines of age, though she
must be over forty. Everything about her person was«har-
monious and controlled. Her voice was low, pleasant in
timbre. "I didn't know you were here in Abbenay," she
said, "or where you were—or even whether you were. I
was in the Press depot looking through new publications,
picking things up for the Engineering library, and I saw a
book by Sabul and Shevek. Sabul I knew, of course. But
who's Shevek? Why does it sound so familiar? I didn't
arrive at it for a minute or more. Strange, isn't it? But it
didn't seem reasonable. The Shevek I knew would be only
twenty, not likely to be co-authoring treatises in metacos-
mology with Sabul. But any other Shevek would have to-
be even younger than twenty!... So I came to see. A boy
in the domicile said you were here. . , . This is a shock-
ingly understaffed clinic. I don't understand why the
syndics dont request some more postings from the Medical
Federation, or else cut down the number of admissions;

some of these aides and doctors are working eight hours a
day! Of course, there are people in the medical arts who
actually want that: the self-sacrifice impulse. Unfortunate-
ly it doesn't lead to meximum efficiency, ... It was strange
to find you. I would never have known you.. . . Are you
and Palat in touch? How is he?"

"He's dead."

"Ah." There was no pretense of shock or grief in
Rulag'a voice, only a kind of dreary accustomedness, a
bleak note. Shevek was moved by it, enabled to see her,
for a moment, as a person.

"How long ago did he die?"

"Eight years."

"He couldn't have been more than thirty-five."

*There was an earthquake in Wide Plains. We'd been
living there about five years, he was construction engineer
for the community. The quake damaged the learning
center. He was with the others trying to get out some of
the children who were trapped inside. There was a second
98

quake and the whole thing went down. There were thirty-
two people killed."

"Were you there?"

"I'd gone to start training at the Regional Institute
about ten days before the quake."

She mused, her face smooth and still. **Poor Palat.
Somehow it's like him—to have died with others, a statis-
tic, one of thirty-two.. .."

"The statistics would have been higher if he hadn't
gone into the building," Shevek said.

She looked at him then. Her gaze did not show what
emotions she felt or did not feel. What she said might be
spontaneous or deliberate, there was no way to tell. "You
were fond of Palat"

He did not answer.

"You don't look like him. In fact you look like me,
except in coloring. I thought you'd look like Palat. I
assumed it Ifs strange how one's imagination makes these
assumptions. He stayed with you, then?"

Shevek nodded.

"He was lucky." She did not sigh, but a suppressed sigh
was in her voice.

"So was I,"

There was a pause. She smiled faintly. "Yes. I could
have kept in touch with you. Do you hold it against me,
my not having done so?"

"Hold it against you? I never knew you.*

'^ou did. Palat and I kept you with us in the domicile,
even after you were weaned. We both wanted to. Those
first years are when the individual contact is essential; the
psychologists have proved it conclusively. Full socialization
can be developed only from that affectional beginning. . ..
I was willing to continue the partnership. I tried to have
Palat posted here to Abbenay. There never was an open-
ing in his line of work, and he wouldn't come without a
posting. He had a stubborn streak. ... At first he wrote
sometimes to tell me how you were, then he stopped
writing."

"It doesn*t matter," the young man said. His face, thin
from illness, was covered with very fine drops of sweat,
making his cheeks and forehead look silvery, as if oiled.

There was silence again, and Rulag said in her con-
trolled, pleasant voice, "Well, yes; it mattered, and it still
99

matters. But Palat was the one to stay with you and see
you through your integrative years. He was supportive, he
was parental, as I am not. The work comes first, with me.
It has always come first Still, I'm glad you're here now,
Shevek. Perhaps I can be of some use to you, now. I
know Abbenay is a forbidding place at first. One feels lost,
isolated, lacking the simple solidarity the little towns ^ave.
I know interesting people, whom you might like to meet.
And people who might be useful to you. I know Sabul;

I have some notion of what you may have come up
against, with him, and with the whole Institute. They play
dominance games there. It takes some experience to know
how to outplay them. In any case, I'm glad you're here.
It gives me a pleasure I never looked for—a kind of
joy. ... I read your book. It is yours, isn't it? Why else
would Sabul be co-publishing with a twenty-year-old
student? The subject's beyond me, I'm only an engineer.
I confess to being proud of you. That's strange, isn't it?
Unreasonable. Propertarian, even. As if you were some-
thing that belonged to mel But as one gets older one
needs certain reassurances that aren't, always, entirely
reasonable. In order to go on at all."

He saw her loneliness. He saw her pain, and resented
it It threatened him. It threatened his father's loyalty,
that clear constant love in which bis life had taken root.
What right had she, who had left Palat in need, to come
in her need to Palafs son? He had nothing, nothing to
give her, or anyone. "It might have been better," he said,
"if you'd gone on thinking of me as a statistic too."

"Ah," she said, the soft, habitual, desolate response.
She looked away from him.

The old men down at the end of the ward were admiring
her, nudging each other.

"I suppose," she said, *'that I was trying to make a claim
on you. But I thought in terms of your making a claim on
me. If you wanted to."

He said nothing.

"We arent, except biologically, mother and son, of
course." She had regained her faint smile. "You don't
remember me, and the baby I remember isn't this man
of twenty. All that is time past, irrelevant. But we are
brother and sister, here and now. Which is what really
matters, isn't it?"

100

"I don't know."

She sat without speaking for a minute, then stood up.
''You need to rest. You were quite ill the first time I came.
They say you'll be quite all right now. I don't suppose 111

be back."

He did not speak. She said, "Goodbye, Shevek," and
turned from him as she spoke. He had either a glimpse or
a nightmare imagination of her face changing drastically
as she spoke, breaking down, going all to pieces. It must
have been imagination. She walked out of the ward with
the graceful measured gait of a handsome woman, and he
saw her stop and speak, smiling, to the aide out in the

hall.

He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the
sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of time.
He broke. He began to cry, trying to hide his face in the
shelter of his arms, for he could not find the strength to
turn over. One of the old men, the sick old men, came
and sat on the side of the cot and patted his shoulder.
"It's all right, brother. It'll be all right, little brother," he
muttered. Shevek heard him and felt his touch, but took
no comfort in it. Even from the brother there is no comfort
in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall.

101

Chapter 5




Shevek ended his career as a tourist with relief. The new

term was opening at leu Eun; now he could settle down
to live, and work, in Paradise, instead of merely looking
at it from outside.

He took on two seminars and an open lecture course.
No teaching was requested of him, but he had asked if he
could teach, and the administrators had arranged the
seminars. The open class was neither his idea nor theirs.
A delegation of students came and asked him to give it.
He consented at once. This was how courses were or-
ganized in Anarresti learning centers: by student demand,
or on the teacher's initiative, or by students and teachers
together. When he found that the administrators were
upset, he laughed. "Do they expect students not to be an-
archists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When
you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bot-
tom up!" He had no intention of being administered out of
the course—he had fought this kind of battle before—and
because he communicated his firmness to the students,
they held firm. To avoid unpleasant publicity the Rectors
of the University gave in, and Shevek began his course to a
first-day audience of two thousand. Attendance soon
dropped. He stuck to physics, never going off into the
102

personal or the political, and it was physics on a pretty
advanced level. But several hundred students continued to
come. Some came out of mere curiosity, to see the man
from the Moon; others were drawn by Shevek's personali-
ty, by the glimpses of the man and the libertarian which
they could catch from his words even when they could not
follow his mathematics. And a surprising number of them
were capable of following both the philosophy and the
mathematics.

They were superbly trained, these students. Their minds
were fine, keen, ready. When they weren't working, they
rested. They were not blunted and distracted by a dozen
other obligations. They never fell asleep in class because
they were tired from having worked on rotational duty the
day before. Their society maintained them in complete
freedom from want, distraction, and cares.

What they were free to do, however, was another ques-
tion. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obli-
gation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of
initiative.

He was appalled by the examination system, when it
was explained to him; he could not imagine a greater
deterrent to the natural wish to leam than this pattern of
cramming in information and disgorging it at demand.
At first he refused to give any tests or grades, but this
upset the University administrators so badly that, not wish-
ing to be discourteous to his hosts, he gave in. He asked
his students to write a paper on any problem in physics
that interested them, and told them that he would give
them all the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would
have something to write on their forms and lists. To his
surprise a good many students came to him to complain.
They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right
questions; they did not want to think about questions, but
to write down the answers they had learned. And some of
them objected strongly to his giving everyone the same
mark. How could the diligent students be distinguished
from the dull ones? What was the good in working
hard? If no competitive distinctions were to be made, one
might as well do nothing.

"Well, of course," Shevek said, troubled. "If you do not
want to do the work, you should not do it."

They went away unappeased, but polite. They were
103

pleasant boys, with frank and civil manners. Shevek's
readings in Urrasti history led him to decide that they
were, in fact, though the word was seldom used these
days, aristocrats. In feudal times the aristocracy had sent
their sons to university, conferring superiority on the
institution. Nowadays it was the other way rounds the
university conferred superiority on the man. They told
Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to
leu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential de-
mocracy of the institution. He sand, "You put another lock
on the door and call it democracy." He liked his polite,
intelligent students, but he felt no great warmth towards
any of them. They were planning careers as academic or
industrial scientists, and what they learned from him was
to them a means to that end, success in their careers. They
either had, or denied the importance of, anything else he
might have offered them.

He found himself, therefore, with no duties at all beyond
the preparation of his three classes; the rest of his time
was all his own. He had not been in a situation like this
since his early twenties, his first years at the Institute in
^bbenay. Since those years his social and personal life had
got more and more complicated and demanding. He had
been not only a physicist but also a partner, a father, an
Odonian, and finally a social reformer. As such, he had not
been sheltered, and had expected no shelter, from what-
ever cares and responsibilities came to him. He had not
been free from anything: only free to do anything. Here, it
was the other way around. Like all the students and pro-
fessors, he had nothing to do but his intellectual work,
literally nothing. The beds were made for them, the
rooms were swept for them, the routine of the college was
managed for them, the way was made plain for them. And
no wives, no families. No women at all. Students at the
University were not permitted to many. Married profes-
sors usually lived during the five class days of the seven-day
week in bachelor quarters on campus, going home only on
weekends. Nothing distracted. Complete leisure to work;

all materials at hand; intellectual stimulation, argument,
conversation whenever wanted; no pressures. Paradise
indeed! But he seemed unable to get to work.

There was something lacking—in him, he thought, not
in the place. He was not up to it He was not strong
104

enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt
himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful
oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off ha soul;

the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could
not drink.

He forced himself to work, but even there he found no
certainty. He seemed to have lost the flair which, in his
own estimation of himself, he counted as his main ad-
vantage over most other physicists, the sense for where the
really important problem lay, the clue that led inward to
the center. Here, he seemed to have no sense of direc-
tion- He worked at the Light Research Laboratories, read
a great deal, and wrote three papers that summer and
autumn: a productive half year, by normal standards. But
he knew that in fact he had done nothing real.

Indeed the longer he lived on Urras, the less real it be-
came to him. It seemed to be slipping out of his grasp—all
that vital, magnificent, inexhaustible world which he had
seen from the windows of his room, his first day on the
world. It slipped out of his awkward, foreign hands,
eluded him, and when he looked again he was holding
something quite different, something he had not wanted at
all, a kind of waste paper, wrappings, rubbish.

He got money for the papers he wrote. He already had
in an account in the National Bank the 10,000 Interna-
tional Monetary Units of the Seo Oen award, and a grant
of 5,000 from the loti Government. That sum was now
augmented by his salary as a professor and the money
paid him by the University Press for the three monographs.
At first all this seemed funny to him; then it made him
uneasy. He must not dismiss as ridiculous what was, after
all, of tremendous importance here. He tried to read an
elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it
was like listening to somebody interminably recounting
a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to
understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all
the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as:

the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate,
and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there
might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the
rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and
envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the
terrible became banaL Shevek looked at this monstrous
105

pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not
admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.

Saio Pae had taken him "shopping" during his second
week in A-Io. Though he did not consider cutting his
hair—his hair, after all, was part of him—he wanted an
Urrasti-style suit of clothes and pair of shoes. He had no
desire to look any more foreign than he could hel^ftook-
ing. The simplicity of his old suit made it positively, osten-
tatious, and his soft, crude desert boots appeared very odd
indeed among the lotis' fanciful footgear. So at his re-
quest Pae had taken him to Saemtenevia Prospect, the
elegant retail street of Nio Esseia, to be fitted by a tailor
and a shoemaker.

The whole experience had been so bewildering to him
that he put it out of mind as soon as possible, but he had
dreams about it for months afterwards, nightmares. Saem-
tenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid
mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things
for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches,
shuts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls,
vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping,
while swimming, while playing games, while at an after-
noon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in
the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while
riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining,
hunting—all different, all in hundreds of different cuts,
styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks.
lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras,
games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, col-
anders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars,
a baby's teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock
crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wrist-
watch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenira
and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-
brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented
so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excre-
ment. In the first block Shevek had stopped to look at a
shaggy, spotted coat, the central display in a glittering
window of clothes and jewelry. 'The coat costs 8,400
units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a
newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units a
year- "Oh, yes, that's real fur, quite rare now that the
animals are protected," Pae had said. "Pretty thing, isn't
106

it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more
block Shevek had felt utterly exhausted. He could not look
any more. He wanted to hide his eyes.

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was
that none of the millions of things for sale were made
there. They were only sold there. Where were the work-
shops, the factories, where were the farmers, the crafts-
men, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers,
the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the
hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere
else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were
either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things
but that of possession.

He found that once they had his measure he could order
anything else he might need by telephone, and he deter-
mined never to go back to the nightmare street

The suit of clothes and the shoes were delivered in a
week. He put them on and stood before the full-length
mirror in his bedroom. The fitted grey coat-gown, white
shirt, black breeches, and stockings and polished shoes
were becoming to his long, thin figure and narrow feet
He touched the surface of one shoe gingerly. It was made
of the same stuff that covered the chairs in the other
room, the material that felt like skin; he had asked some-
one recently what it was, and had been told that it was
skin—animal hide, leather, they called it. He scowled at
the touch, straightened up, and turned away from the
mirror, but not before he had been forced to see that,
thus clothed, his resemblance to his mother Rulag was
stronger than ever.

There was a long breafc between terms in midautumn.
Most students went home for the holiday. Shevek went
mountain-hiking in the Meiteis for a few days with a
group of students and researchers from the Light Research
Laboratory, then returned to claim some hours on the
big computer, which was kept very busy during term. But,
sick of work that got nowhere, he did not work hard. He
slept more than usual, walked, read, and told himself that
the trouble was he had simply been in too much of a hurry;

you couldn't get hold of a whole new world in a few
months. The lawns and groves of the University were beau-
tiful and disheveled, gold leaves flaring and blowing on
107

the rainy wind under a soft grey sky. Shevek looked
up the works of the great loti poets and read them; he
understood them now when they spoke of flowers, and
birds flying, and the colors of forests in autumn. That
understanding came as a great pleasure to him. It was
pleasant to return at dusk to his room, whose calm beauty
of proportion never failed to satisfy him. He was useu to
that grace and comfort now, it had become familiar to
him. So had the faces at Evening Commons, the colleagues,
some liked more and some less but all, by now, familiar.
So had the food, in all its variety and quantity, which at
first had staggered him. The men who waited tables knew
his wants and served him as he would have served himself.
He still did not eat meat; he had tried it, out of politeness
and to prove to himself that he had no irrational preju-
dices, but his stomach had its reasons which reason does
not know, and rebelled- After a couple of near disasters
he had given up the attempt and remained a vegetarian,
though a hearty one. He enjoyed dinner very much. He had
gained three or four kilos since coming to Urras; he
looked very well now, sunburnt from his mountain expedi-
tion, rested by the holiday. He was striking figure as he
got up from table in the great dining hall. with its beamed
ceiling far overhead in shadow, and its paneled, portrait-
hung walls, and its tables bright with candle flames and
porcelain and silver. He greeted someone at another table
and moved on, with an expression of peaceable detach-
ment. From across the room Chifoilisk saw him, and
followed him, catching up at the door.

"Have you got a few minutes to spare, Shevek?"

"Yes. My rooms?" He was accustomed to the constant
use of the possessive pronoun by now, and spoke it without
self-consciousness.

Chifoilisk seemed to hesitate. "What about the library?
It's on your way, and I want to pick up a book there."

They set off across the quadrangle to the Library of the
Noble Science—the old term of physics, which even on
Anarres was preserved in certain usages—walking side by
side in the pattering dark. Chifoilisk put up an umbrella.
but Shevek walked in rain as the loti walked in sun-
shine, with enjoyment.

"You're getting soaked," Chifoilisk grumbled. "Got a
bad chest, haven't you? Ought to take care."
108

"I'm very well," Shevek said, and smiled as he strode
through the fresh, fine rain. 'That doctor from the
Government, you know, he gave me some treatments,
inhalations. It works; I don't cough. I asked the doctor to
describe the process and the drugs, on the radio to the
Syndicate of Initiative in Abbenay. He did so. He was
glad to do so. It is simple enough; it may relieve much
suffering from the dust cough. Why, why not earlier? Why
do we not work together, Chifoilisk?"

The Thuvian gave a little sardonic grunt. They came
into the reading room of the library. Aisles of old books,
under delicate double arches of marble, stood in dim se-
renity; the lamps on the long reading tables were plain
spheres of alabaster. No one else was there, but an atten-
dant hastened in behind them to light the fire laid on the
marble hearth and to make sure they wanted nothing be-
fore he withdrew again. Chifoilisk stood before the hearth.
watching the kindling catch. His brows bristled over his
small eyes; his coarse, swarthy, intellectual face looked
older than usual.

"I want to be disagreeable, Shevek," he said in his
hoarse voice. He added, "Nothing unusual in that, I sup-
pose"—a humility Shevek had not looked for in him.

"What's the mattery

"I want to know whether you know what you're doing
here."

After a pause Shevek said, "I think I do."

"You are aware, then, that you've been bought?'*

"Bought?"

*'Call it co-opted, if you like. Listen. No matter how in-
telligent a man is, he can't see what he doesn't know how
to see. How can you understand your situation, here, in a
capitalist economy, a plutocratic-oligarchic State? How
can you see it, coming from your little commune of starv-
ing idealists up there in the sky?"

"Chifoilisk, there aren't many idealists left on Anarres,
I assure you. The Settlers were idealists, yes, to leave this
world for our deserts. But that was seven generations agol
Our society is practical. Maybe too practical, too much
concerned with survival only. What is idealistic about so-
cial cooperation, mutual aid, when it is the only means of
staying alive?"

"I can't argue the values of Odonianism with you. Not
109

that T havent wanted tol I do know something about it,
you know. We're a lot closer to it, in my country, than
these people are. We're products of the same great revolu-
tionary movement of the eighth century—we're socialists,
like you."

"But you are archists. The State of Thu is even ftore
centralized than the State of A-Io. One power structure
controls all, the government, administration, police, army,
education, laws, trades, manufactures. And you have the
money economy."

"A money economy based on the principle that each
worker is paid as he deserves, for the value of his labor—
not by capitalists whom he's forced to serve, but by the
state of which he's a member!"

"Does he establish the value of his own labor?"

"Why dont you come to Thu and see how real socialisny
functions?"

"I know how real socialism functions," Shevek said. "I
could tell you, but would your government let me explain
it, in Thu?"

Chifoilisk kicked a log that had not yet caught His ex-
pression as he stared down into the fire was bitter, the
lines between the nose and the comers of his Ups cut deep.
He did not answer Shevek's question. He said at last, "I'm
not going to try to play games with you. It's no good; any-
how I won't do it What I have to ask you is this: would
you be willing to come to Thu?"

"Not now, Chifoilisk."

"But what can you accomplish—here?"

"My work. And also, here I am near the seat of the
Council of World Governments—"

"The CWG? They've been in A-Io's pocket for thirty
years. Don't look to them to save youl"

A pause. "Am I in danger, then?"

"You didn't realize even that?"

Another pause.

"Against whom do you warn me?" Shevek asked.

"Against Pae, in the first place."

"Oh, yea, Pae." Shevek leaned his hands against the or-
nate, gold-inlaid mantelpiece. "Pae is a pretty good physi-
cist. And very obliging. But I don't trust him."

"Why not?"

"Well... he evades."

110

"Yes. An acute psychological Judgment. But Pae isn't
dangerous to you because he's personally slippery, Shevek.
He's dangerous to you because he is a loyal, ambitious
agent of the loti Government. He reports on you, and on
me, regularly to the Department of National Security—
the secret police. I don't underestimate you. God knows,
but don't you see, your habit of approaching, everybody
as a person, an individual, won't do here, it won't worki
You have got to understand the powers behind the individ-
uals."

While Chifoilisk spoke, Shevek's relaxed posture had
stiffened; he now stood straight, like Chifoilisk, look-
ing down at the fire. He said, "How do you know that
about Pae?"

"By the same means I know that your room contains a
concealed microphone, just as mine does. Because it's my
business to know it."

"Are you also an agent of your government?"

Chifoilisk's face closed down; then he turned suddenly
to Shevek, speaking softly and with hatred, '^es," by
said, "of course I am. If I weren't I wouldn't be here.
Everyone knows that. My government sends abroad only
men whom it can trust. And they can trust me! Because
I haven't been bought, like all these damned rich loti
professors. I believe in my government, in my country. I
have faith in them." He forced his words out in a kind of
torment. "You've got to look around you, Shevek! You're
a child among thieves. They're good to you, they give you
a nice room, lectures, students, money, tours of castles.
tours of model factories, visits to pretty villages. All the!
best. All lovely, fine! But why? Why do they bring you;

here from the Moon, praise you, print your books, keep
you so safe and snug in the lecture rooms and laboratories
and libraries? Do you think they do it out of scientific!
disinterest, out of brotherly love? This is a profit economy,
Shevek!"

"I know, I came to bargain with it"

"Bargain—what? For what?"

Shevek's face had taken on the cold, grave look it had
worn when he left the Fort in Drio. "You know what I
want, Chifoilisk. I want my people to come out of exile.
I came here because I don't think you want that, in Thu.
You are afraid of us, there. You fear we might bring
111

back the revolution, the old one, the real one, the revolu-
tion for justice which you began and then stopped half-
way. Here in A-Io they fear me less because they have
forgotten the revolution. They don't believe in it any more.
They think if people can possess enough things they will be
content to live in prison. But I will not believe that^ want
the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity. I
want free exchange between Urras and Anarres. I worked
for it as I could on Anarres, cow I work for it as I can on
Urras. There, I acted. Here, I bargain."

"With what?"

"Oh, you know, Chifoilisk," Shevek said in a low voice,
with diffidence. "You know what it is they want from me."

"Yes, I know, but I didn't know you did," the Thuvian
said, also speaking low; his harsh voice became a harsher
murmur, all breath and fricatives. "You've got it, then—
the General Temporal Theory?"

Shevek looked at him, perhaps with a touch of irony.

Chifoilisk insisted: "Does it exist in writing?"

Shevek continued to look at him for a minute, and then,
answered directly, "No."

"Goodi"

"Why?"

"Because if it did, they'd have it"

"What do you mean?"

"Just that. Listen, wasn't it Odo who said that where
there's property there's theft?"

"To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime,
create laws.' The Social Organism."

"All right. Where there are papers in locked rooms,
there are people with keys to the rooms!"

Shevek winced. "Yes," he said presently, "this is very
disagreeable."

"To you. Not to me. I haven't your individualistic
moral scruples, you know. I knew you didn't have the
Theory down in writing. If I'd thought you had, I would
have made every effort to get it from you, by persuasion,
by theft, by force if I thought we could abduct you with-
out bringing on a war with A-Io. Anything, so that I
could get it away from these fat loti capitalists and into
the hands of the Central Presidium of my country. Be-
cause the highest cause I can ever serve is the strength
and welfare of my country."

112

'^you are lying," Shevet said peaceably. "I think you
are a patriot, yes. But you set above patriotism your
respect for the truth, scientific truth, and perhaps also
your loyalty to individual persons. You would not betray

me.**

"I would if I could," Chifoilisk said savagely. He
started to go on, stopped, and finally said with angry
resignation, "Think as you please. I cant open your eyes
for you. But remember, we want you. If you finally see
what's going on here, then come to Thu. You picked the
wrong people to try to make brothers ofl And if—I have
no business saying this. But it doesn't matter. If you won't
come to us in Thu, at least don't give your Theory to the
loti. Don't give the usurers anythingi Get out. Go home.
Give your own people what you have to givel"

"They don't want it," Shevek said, expressionless. "Do
you think I did not try?"

Pour or five days later Shevek, asking after Chifoilisk,
was informed that he had gone back to Thu.
"To stay? He didn't tell me he was leaving."
"A Thuvian never knows when he's going to get an
order from his Presidium," Pae said, for of course it was
Pae who told Shevek. "He just knows that when it comes
he'd better hop. And not stop for any leavetakings on the
way. Poor old Chifl I wonder what he did wrong?*'

Shevek went once or twice a week to see Atro in the
pleasant little house on the edge of the campus where he
lived with a couple of servants, as old as himself, to look
after him. At nearly eighty he was, as he put it himself, a
monument to a first-class physicist. Though he had not
seen his life work go unrecognized as Gvarab had, through
tebeer age he had attained something of her dismter-
estedness. His interest in Shevek, at least, appeared to be
entirely personal—a comradeship. He had been the first
Sequency physicist to be converted to Shevek's approach
to the understanding of time. He had fought, with She-
vek's weapons, for Shevek's theories, against the whole
establishment of scientific respectability, and the battle
had gone on for several years before the publication of
the uncut Principles of Simultaneity and the promptly en-
suing victory of the Simultaneists. That battle had been
113

the high point of Atro*s life. He would not have fought
for less than the truth, but it was the fighting he had
loved, better than the truth.

Atro could trace his genealogy back for eleven hundred
years, through generals, princes, great landowners. The
family still owned an estate of seven thousand ac^ft and
fourteen villages in Sie Province, the most rural region of
A-Io. He had provincial turns of speech, archaisms to
which he clung with pride. Wealth impressed him not at
all, and he referred to the entire government of his coun-
try as "demagogues and crawling politicians." His respect
was not to be bought Yet he gave it, freely, to any fool
with what he called "the right name." In some ways he
was totally incomprehensible to Shevek—an enigma: the
aristocrat. And yet his genuine contempt for both money
and power made Shevek feel closer to him than to any-
one else he had met on Unas.

Once, as they sat together on the glassed-in porch
where he raised all kinds of rare and out-of-season flow-
ers, he chanced to use the phrase, "we Cetians." Shevek
caught him up on it: " 'Cetians'—isn't that a birdseed
word?" "Birdseed" was slang for the popular press, the
newspapers, broadcasts, and fiction manufactured for the
urban working people.

"Birdseed!" Atro repeated. "My dear fellow, where the
devil do you pick up these vulgarisms? I mean by 'Cetians'
precisely what the daily-paper writers and their lip-mov-
ing readers understand by the term. Urras and Anarres!"

"I was surprised that you used a foreign word—a non-
Cetian word, in fact."

"Definition by exclusion," the old man parried gleefully.
"A hundred years ago we didn't need the word. 'Mankind*
would do. But sixty-some years ago that changed. I was
seventeen, it was a nice sunny day in early summer, I re-
member it quite vividly. I was exercising my horse, and
my elder sister called out the window, They're talking to
Somebody from Outer Space on the radio!' My poor dear
mother thought we were all doomed; foreign devils, you
know. But it was only the Hainish, quacking about peace
'and brotherhood. Well, nowadays 'mankind' is a bit over-
inclusive. What defines brotherhood but nonbrotherhood?
Definition by exclusion, my dear! You and I are kinsmen.
Your people were probably herding goats in the moun-
114

tains while mine were oppressing serfs in Sie, a few cen-
turies ago; but we're members of the same family. To
know it, one only has to meet—to hear of—an alien. A
being from another solar system. A man, so-called, who
has nothing in common with us except the practical ar-
rangement of two legs, two arms, and a head with some
kind of brain in it!"

"But haven't the Hainish proved that we are—*'
"AH of alien origin, offspring of Hainish interstellar
colonists, half a million years ago, or a million, or two or
three million, yes, I know. Proved! By the Primal Num-
ber, Shevek, you sound like a first-year seminarian! How
can you speak seriously of historical proof, over such a
span of time? Those Hainish toss millennia about like
handballs, but it's all juggling. Proof, indeed! The religion
of my fathers informs me, with equal authority, that I'm
a descendant of Pinra Od, whom God exiled from the
Garden because he had the audacity to count his fingers
and toes, add them up to twenty, and thus let Time loose
upon the universe. I prefer that story to the aliens', if I
must choosel"

Shevek laughed; Atro's humors gave him pleasure. But
the old man was serious. He tapped Shevek on the arm,
and, twitching his eyebrows and munching with his lips
as he did when he was moved, said, "I hope you feel the
same, my dear. I earnestly hope it. There's a great deal
that's admirable, I'm sure, in your society, but it doesn't
teach you to discriminate—which is after all the best thing
civilization teaches. I don't want those damned aliens get-
ting at you through your notions about brotherhood and
mutualism and all that They'll spout you whole rivers of
'common humanity' and 'leagues of all the worlds' and so
on, and I'd hate to see you swallow it. The law of exis-
tence is struggle—competition—elimination of the weak
—a ruthless war for survival. And I want to see the best
survive. The kind of humanity I know. The Cetians. You
and I: Urras and Anarres. We're ahead of them now, all
those Hainish and Terrans and whatever else they call
themselves, and we've got to stay ahead of them. They
brought us the interstellar drive, but we're making better
interstellar ships now than they are. When you come to
release your theory, I earnestly hope you'll think of your
duty to your own people, your own kind. Of what loyalty
115

means, and to whom it's due." The easy tears of old age
had sprung into Atro*s half-blind eyes. Shevek put his
hand on the old man's arm, reassuring, but he said n<h-
ing.

•They'll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought
to. Scientific truth will out, you can't hide the sun under a
stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I
want us to take our rightful place. I want respect: and
that's what you can win us. Transilience—if we've mas-
tered transilience, their interstellar drive won't amount to
a hill of beans. It's not money I want, you know. I want
the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiori-
ty of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar
civilization, then by God I don't want my people to be
low-caste members of ill We should come in like noble-
men, with a great gift in our hands—that's how it should
be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way,
how's it going, your book?"

"I've been working on Skask's gravitational hypothesis.
I have a feeling he's wrong in using partial differential
equations only."

"But your last paper was on gravity. When are you go-
ing to get to the real thing?"

"You know that the means are the end, to us Odoni-
ans," Shevek said lightly. "Besides, I can't very well pre-
sent a theory of time that omits gravity, can I?"

"You mean you're giving it to us in bits and dribbles?"
Atro asked, suspiciously. "That hadn't occurred to me.
I'd better look over that last paper. Some of it didn't
make much sense to me. My eyes get so tired these days.
I think that damnable magnifier-projector-thingy I have to
use for reading has something wrong with it. It doesn't
seem to project the words clearly any more."

Shevek looked at the old man with compunction and
affection, but he did not tell him any more about the
state of his theory.

Invitations to receptions, dedications, openings, and so
forth were delivered to Shevek daily. He went to some,
because he had come to Urras on a mission and must try
to fulfill it: he must urge the idea of brotherhood, he must
represent, in his own person, the solidarity of the Two
116

Worlds. He spoke, and people listened to him and said,
"How true."

He wondered why the government did not stop him
from speaking. Chifoilisk must have exaggerated, for his
own purposes, the extent of the control and censorship
they could exert. He talked pure anarchism, and they did
not stop him. But did they need to stop him? It seemed
that he talked to the same people every time: well
dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the
only kind of people on Urras? "It is pain that brings men
together," Shevek said standing up before them, and they
nodded and said, "How true."

He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly
ceased accepting their invitations.

But to do so was to accept failure and to increase his
isolation. He wasn't doing what he had come here to do.
It was not that they cut him off, he told himself; it was
that—as always—he had cut himself off from them. He
was lonely, stiflingly lonely, among all the people he saw
every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch. He
felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras in
all these months.

In the Senior Commons at table one night he said, "You
know, I don't know how you live, here. I see the private
houses, from the outside. But from the inside I know oniy
your not-private life—meeting rooms, refectories, labora-
tories. .. .*'

The next day One rather stiffly asked Shevek if he
would come to dinner and stay overnight, the next week-
end, at One's home.

It was in Amoeno, a village a few miles from leu Eun,
and it was by Urrasti standards a modest middle-class
house, older than most, perhaps. It had been built about
three hundred years ago, of stone, with wood-paneled
rooms. The characteristic loti double arch was used in
window frames and doorways, A relative absence of fur-
niture pleased Shevek's eye at once: the rooms looked
austere, spacious, with their expanses of deeply polished
floor. He had always felt uneasy amidst the extravagant
decorations and conveniences of the public buildings in
which the receptions, dedications, and so forth were held.
The Urra&ti had taste, but it seemed often to be in con-
flict with an impulse toward display—conspicuous ex-
117

pense. The natural, aesthetic origin of the desire to own
things was concealed and perverted by economic and com-
petitive compulsions, which in turn told on the qualitmof
the things: all they achieved was a kind of mechanical
lavishness. Here, instead, was grace, achieved through
restraint.

A serving man took their coats at the door. One's wife
came up to greet Shevek from the basement kitchen,
where she had been instructing the cook.

As they talked before dinner, Shevek found himself
speaking to her almost exclusively, with a friendliness, a
wish to make her like him, that surprised himself. But it
was so good to be talking with a woman again! No won-
der he had felt his existence to be cut off, artificial, among
men, always men, lacking the tension and attraction of
the sexual difference. And Sewa One was attractive. Look-
ing at the delicate lines of her nape and temples he lost
his objections to the Urrasti fashion of shaving women's
heads. She was reticent, rather timid; he tried to make her
feel at ease with him, and was very pleased when he
seemed to be succeeding.

They went in to dinner and were joined at the table by
two children. Sewa Oiie apologized: "One simply can't
find a decent nursemaid in this part of the country any
more," she said. Shevek assented, without knowing what a
nursemaid was. He was watching the little boys, with the
same relief, the same delight He bad scarcely seen a
child since he left Anarres.

They were very clean, sedate children, speaking when
spoken to, dressed in blue velvet coats and breeches. They
eyed Shevek with awe, as a creature from Outer Space.
The nine-year-old was severe with the seven-year-old,
muttering at him not to stare, pinching him savagely when
he disobeyed. The little one pinched back and tried to
kick him under the table. The Principle of Superiority did
not seem to be well established in his mind yet.

Oiie was a changed man at home. The secretive look
left his face, and he did not drawl when he spoke. His
family treated him with respect, but there was mutuality
in the respect. Shevek had heard a good deal of Oiie's
views on women, and was surprised to see that he treated
his wife with courtesy, even delicacy. "This is chivalry,"
Sbevek thought, having recently learned the word, but he
118

soon decided it was something better than that. Oiie was
fond of his wife and trusted her. He behaved to her and
to his children very much as an Anarresti might. In fact,
at home, he suddenly appeared as a simple, brotherly kind
of man, a free man.

It seemed to Shevek a very small range of freedom, a
very narrow family, but he felt so much at ease, so much
freer himself, that he was disinclined to criticize.

In a pause after conversation, the younger boy said in
his small, clear voice, "Mr. Shevek doesn't have very good

manners. **

"Why not?" Shevek asked before Oiie's wife could re-
prove the child. '*What did I do?"

"You didn't say thank you."

"For what?"

"When I passed you the dish of pickles."

"Ini! Be quietl"

Sadik! Don't egoize! The tone was precisely the same.

"I thought you were sharing them with me. Were they
a gift? We say thank you only for gifts, in my country.
We share other things without talking about it, you see.
Would you like the pickles back again?"

"No, I don't like them," the child said, looking up with
dark, very clear eyes into Shevek's face.

"That makes it particularly easy to share them," She-
vek said. The older boy was writhing with the suppressed
desire to pinch Ini. but Ini laughed, showing his little
white teeth. After a while in another pause he said in a
low voice, leaning towards Shevek, "Would you like to
see my otter?"

"Yes."

"He's in the back garden. Mother put him out because
she thought he might bother you. Some grownups don't
like animals."

"I like to see them. We have no animals in my coun-
try."

"You don't?" said the older boy, staring. "Father! Mr.
Shevek says they don't have any animals!"

Ini also stared. "But what do you have?"

"Other people. Fish. Worms. And holum trees."

"What are holum trees?"

The conversation went on for half an hour. It was the
first time Shevek had been asked, on Urras, to describe
119

Anarres. The children asked the questions, but the parents
listened with interest. Shevek kept out of the ethical mode
with some scrupulousness; he was not there to propdpm-
dize his host's children. He simply told them what the
Dust was like, what Abbenay looked like, what kind of
clothes one wore, what people did when they wanted new
clothes, what children did in school. This last became
propaganda, despite his intentions. Ini and Aevi were en-
tranced by his description of a curriculum that included
fanning, carpentry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumb-
ing, roadmending, playwriting, and all the other occupa-
tions of the adult community, and by his admission that
nobody was ever punished for anything.

"Though sometimes," he said, "they make you go away
by yourself for a while."

"But what," Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long
kept back, burst from him under pressure, "what keeps
people in order? Why don't they rob and murder each
other?"

"Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things
you take them from the depository. As for violence, well,
I dont know, Oiie; would you murder me, ordinarily? And
if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coer-
cion is the least efficient means of obtaining order."

"All right, but how do you get people to do the dirty
work?"

"What dirty work?" asked Oiie's wife, not following.

"Garbage collecting, grave digging," Oiie said; Shevek
added, "Mercury mining," and nearly said, "Shit pro-
cessing," but recollected the loti taboo on scatological
words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras,
that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but
never mentioned shit.

"Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for
very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decad
the community management committee or the block com-
mittee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such
work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable
work postings, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines
and mills, normally they're for one half year only."

"But then the whole personnel must consist of people
}ust learning the job."

"Yes. It's not efficient, but what else is to be done? You
120

cant tell a man to work on a job that win cripple him or
kill him in a few years. Why should be do that?*'

"He can refuse the order?"

"It's not an order, Oiie. He goes to EMvlab—the Divi-
sion of Labor office—and says, I want to do such and
such, what have you got? And they tell him where there
are jobs."

"But then why do people do the dirty work at all? Why
do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?"

"Because they are done together. . . . And other rea-
sons. You know, life on Anarres isn't rich, as it is here.
In the little communities there isn't very much entertain-
ment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you
work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenthday it's
pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with
a different group of people. . . . And then there is chal-
lenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is fi-
nances, need for money or desire for profit, but where
there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe.
People like to do things. They like to do them welL People
take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in
doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to
the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I
ami You know? A person likes to do what he is good at
doing.... But really, it is the question of ends and means.
After all. work is done for the work's sake. It is the lasting
pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And
also the social conscience, the opinion of one's neighbors.
There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law.
One's own pleasure, and the respect of one's fellows. That
is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the
neighbors becomes a very mighty force."

"No one ever defies it?"

"Perhaps not often enough," Shevek said.

"Does everybody work so hard, then?" Oiie's wife
asked. "What happens to a man who just won't cooper-
ate?"

"Well, he moves on. The others get tired of him, you
know. They make fun of him, or they get rough with him,
beat him up; in a small community they might agree to
take his name off the meals listing, so he has to cook and
eat all by himself; that is humiliating. So he moves on,
and stays in another place for a while, and then maybe
121

moves on again. Some do it all their lives. Nuchnibf,
they're called. I am a sort of nuchnib. I am here evading
my own work posting. I moved farther than most." ^he-
vek spoke tranquilly; if there was bitterness in his voice it
was not discernible to the children, nor explicable to the
adults. But a little silence followed on his words.

"I don't know who does the dirty work here," he said.
"I never see it being done. It's strange. Who does it? Why
do they do it? Are they paid more?"

"For dangerous work, sometimes. For merely menial
tasks, no. Less."

"Why do they do them, then?"

"Because low pay is better than no pay," Oiie said, and
the bitterness in his voice was quite clear. His wife began
speaking nervously to change the subject, but he went on,
"My grandfather was a janitor. Scrubbed floors and
changed dirty sheets in a hotel for fifty years. Ten hours a
day, six days a week. He did it so that he and his family
could eat." Oiie stopped abruptly, and glanced at Shevek
with his old secretive, distrustful look, and then, almost
with defiance, at his wife. She did not meet his eyes. She
smiled and said in a nervous, childish voice, "Demaere's
father was a very successful man. He owned four com-
panies when he died." Her smile was that of a person in
pain, and her dark, slender hands were pressed tightly one
over the other.

"I don't suppose you have successful men on Anarres,"
Oiie said with heavy sarcasm. Then the cook entered to
change the plates, and he stopped speaking at once. Th&
child Ini, as if knowing that the serious talk would not
resume while the servant was there, said, "Mother, may
Mr. Shevek see my otter when dinner's over?"

When they returned to the sitting room Ini was al-
lowed to bring in his pet: a half-grown land otter, a
common animal on Unas. They had been domesticated,
Oiie explained, since prehistoric times, first for use as fish
retrievers, then as pets. The creature had short legs, an
arched and supple back, glossy dark-brown fur. It was the
first uncaged animal Shevek had seen close up, and it was
more fearless of him than he was of it. The white, sharp
teeth were impressive. He put his hand out cautiously to
stroke it. as Ini insisted he do. The otter sat up on its
haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot
122

with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. "Ammar," She-
vek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of
being—"brother."

The otter grunted, dropped to all fours, and examined
Shevek's shoes with interest.

"He likes you," Ini said.

"I like him," Shevek replied, a little sadly. Whenever
he saw an animal, the flight of birds, the splendor of
autumn trees, that sadness came into him and gave de-
light a cutting edge. He did not think consciously of Tak-
ver at such moments, he did not think of her absence.
Rather ft was as if she were there though he was not
thinking about her. It was as if the beauty and straagenesa
of the beasts and plants of Urras had been charged with
a message for him by Takver, who would never see them,
whose ancestors for seven generations had never touched
an animal's warm fur or seen the flash of wings in ths
shade of trees.

He spent the night in a bedroom under the eaves. It
was cold, which was welcome after the perpetual over-
heating of rooms at the University, and quite plain: the
bedstead, bookcases, a chest, a chair, and a painted wood-
en table. It was like home, he thought, ignoring the height
of the bedstead and the softness of the mattress, the fine
woollen blankets and silk sheets, the knickknacks of ivory
on the chest, the leather bindings of the books, and the
fact that the room, and everything in it, and the house it
was in, and the land the house stood on, was private-
property, the property of Demaere Oiie, though he hadn't
built it, and didn't scrub its floors. Shevek put aside such
tiresome discriminations. It was a nice room and not really
so different from a single in a domicile.

Sleeping in that room, he dreamed of Takver. He
dreamed that she was with him in the bed, that her arms
were about him, her body against his body ... but what
room, what room were they in? Where were they? They
were on the Moon together, it was cold, and they were
walking along together. It was a flat place, the Moon, all
covered with bluish-white snow, though the snow was thin
and easily kicked aside to show the luminous white
ground. It was dead, a dead place. "It isn't really like
this," he told Takver, knowing she was frightened. They
were walking towards something, a distant line of some-
123

thing that looked flimsy and shiny like plastic, a remote,
hardly visible barrier across the white plain of snow. In
his heart Shevek was afraid to approach it, but he told
Takver "We'll be there soon." She did not answer him.

124

Chapter 6




When Shevek was sent home after a decad in hospital, his
neighbor in Room 45 came in to see him. He was a
mathematician, very tall and thin. He had an uncorrected
walleye, so that you never could be sure whether he was
looking at you and/or you were looking at him. He and
Shevek had coexisted amicably, side by side in the Insti-
tute domicile, for a year, without ever saying a full sen-
tence to each other.

Desar now came in and stared at or beside Shevek.
"Anything?" he said.

"I'm doing fine, thanks."

"What about bring dinner commons."

"With yours?" Shevek said, influenced by Desar's tele-
graphic style.

"All right."

Desar brought two dinners on a tray over from the
Institute refectory, and they ate together in Shevek's room.
He did the same morning and night for three days till
Shevek felt up to going out again. It was hard to see why
Desar did this. He was not friendly, and the expectations
of brotherhood seemed to mean little to him. One reason
he held aloof from people was to hide his dishonesty; he
was either appallingly la2y or frankly propertarian, for
125

Room 45 was full of stuff that he had no right or reason
to keep—dishes from commons, books from libraries, a
set of woodcarving tools from a craft-supply depot, a
microscope from some laboratory, eight different blankets,
a closet stuffed with clothes, some of which plainly did
not fit Desar and never had, others of which appeared to
be things he had worn when he was eight or ten. It looked
as if he went to depositories and warehouses and picked
things up by the armload whether he needed them or
not. "What do you keep all this junk for?" Shevek asked
when he was first admitted to the room. Desar stared be-
tween him. "Just builds up," he said vaguely.

Desar's chosen field in mathematics was so esoteric
that nobody in the Institute or the Math Federation could
really check on his progress. That was precisely why he
had chosen it. He assumed that Shevek's motivation was
the same. "Hell," he said, "work? Good post here. Se-
quency. Simultaneity, shit," At some moments Shevek
liked Desar, and at others detested him, for the same
qualities. He stuck to him, however, deliberately, as part
of his resolution to change his life.

His illness had made him realize that if he tried to go on
alone he would break down altogether. He saw this in
moral terms, and judged himself ruthlessly. He bad been
keeping himself for himself, against the ethical imperative
of brotherhood. Shevek at twenty-one was not a prig,
exactly, because his morality was passionate and drastic;

but it was still fitted to a rigid mold, the simplistic
Odonianism taught to children by mediocre adults, an
internalized preaching.

He had been doing wrong. He must do right He did

60.

He forbade himself physics five nights in ten. He volun-
teered for committee work in the Institute domicile man-
agement. He attended meetings of the Physics Federa-
tion and the Syndicate of Members of the Institute. He
enrolled with a group who were practicing biofeedback
exercises and brain-wave training. At the refectory he
forced himself to sit down at the large tables, instead of at
a small one with a book in front of him.

It was surprising: people seemed to have been waiting
for him. They included him, welcomed him, invited him
as bedfellow and companion. They took him about with
126

them, and within three decads he learned more about
Abbenay than he had in a year. He went with groups of
cheerful young people to athletic fields, craft centers,
swimming pools, festivals, museums, theaters, concerts.

The concerts: they were a revelation, a shock of joy.

He had never gone to a concert here in Abbenay, part-
ly because he thought of music as something you do
rather than something you hear. As a child he had always
sung, or played one instrument or another, in local choirs
and ensembles; he had enjoyed it very much, but had not
had much talent And that was all he knew of music.

Learning centers taught all the skills that prepare for the
practice of art: training in singing, metrics, dance, the
use of brush, chisel, knife, lathe, and so on. It was all
pragmatic: the children learned to see, speak, hear, move,
handle. No distinction was drawn between the arts and
the crafts; art was not considered as having a place in
life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech.
Thus architecture had developed, early and freely, a con-
sistent style, pure and plain, subtle in proportion. Painting
and sculpture served largely as elements of architecture
and town planning. As for the arts of words, poetry and
storytelling tended to be ephemeral, to be linked with song
and dancing; only the theater stood wholly alone, and only
the theater was ever called "the Art"—a thing complete in
itself. There were many regional and traveling troupes of
actors and dancers, repertory companies, very often with
playwright attached. They performed tragedies, semi-im-
provised comedies, mimes. They were as welcome as rain
in the lonely desert towns, they were the glory of the year
wherever they came. Rising out of and embodying the iso-
lation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama
had attained extraordinary power and brilliance.

Shevek, however, was not very sensitive to the drama.
He liked the verbal splendor, but the whole idea of acting
was uncongenial to him. It was not until this second year
in Abbenay that he discovered, at last, his Art: the art
that is made out of time. Somebody took him along to a
concert at the Syndicate of Music. He went back the next
night. He went to every concert, with his new acquain-
tances if possible, without if need be. The music was a
more urgent need, a deeper satisfaction, than the com-
panionship.

127

His efforts to break out of his essential seclusion were,
in fact, a failure, and he knew it. He made no close friend.
He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was
not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need,
like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward be-
cause it involved another person as object. Masturbation
was preferable, the suitable course for a man like himself.
Solitude was his fate; he was trapped in his heredity. She
had said it: "The work comes first." Rulag had said it
calmly, stating fact, powerless to change it, to break out of
her cold cell. So it was with him. His heart yearned to-
wards them, the kindly young souls who called him broth-
er, but he could not reach them, nor they him. He was
bora to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.

The work came first, but it went nowhere. Like sex, it
ought to have been a pleasure, and it wasn't- He kept
grinding over the same problems, getting not a step nearer
the solution of To's Temporal Paradox, let alone the
Theory of Simultaneity, which last year he had thought
was almost in his grasp. That self-assurance now seemed
incredible to him. Had he really thought himself capable,
at age twenty, of evolving a theory that would change the
foundations of cosmological physics? He had been out
of his mind for a good while before the fever, evidently.
He enrolled in two work groups in philosophical mathe-
matics, convincing himself that he needed them and re-
fusing to admit that he could have directed either course
as well as the instructors. He avoided Sabu! as much as
he could,

In his first burst of new resolutions he had made a point
of getting to know Gvarab better. She responded as well
as she could, but the winter had been hard on her; she was
ill, and deaf, and old. She started a spring course and
then gave it up. She was erratic, hardly recognizing Shevek
one time, and the next dragging him off to her domicile
for a whole evening's talk. He had got somewhat beyond
Gvarab's ideas, and he found these long talks hard.
Either he had to let Gvarab bore him for hours, repeating
what he already knew or had partly disproved, or he had
to hurt and confuse her by trying to set her straight. It
was beyond the patience or tact of anyone his age, and he
ended up evading Gvarab when he could, always with a
bad conscience.

128

There was nobody else to talk shop with. Nobody at the
Institute knew enough about pure temporal physics to keep
up with him. He would have liked to teach it, but he had
not yet been given a teaching posting or a classroom at
the Institute; the faculty-student Syndicate of Members
turned down his request for one. They did not want a
quarrel with Sabul.

As the year went on he took to spending a good deal of
his time writing letters to Atro and other physicists and
mathematicians on Urras. Few of these letters were sent.
Some he wrote and then simply tore up. He discovered that
the mathematician Loai An, to whom he had written a
six-page discourse on temporal reversibility, had been
dead for twenty years; he had neglected to read the bio-
graphical preface to An's Geometries of Time. Other let-
ters, which he undertook to get carried by the freight ships
from Urras, were stopped by the managers of the Port of
Abbenay. The Port was under direct control of PDC.
since its operation involved the coordination of many syn-
dicates, and some of the coordinators had to know lotic.
These Port managers, with their special knowledge and
important position, tended to acquire the bureaucratic
mentality: they said "no" automatically. They mistrusted
the letters to mathematicians, which looked like code, and
which nobody could assure them weren't code. Letters to
physicists were passed if Sabul, their consultant, ap-
proved them. He would not approve those that dealt with
subjects outside his own brand of Sequency physics. "Not
within my competence," he would growl, pushing the letter
aside. Shevek would send it on to the Port managers any-
how, and it would come back marked "Not approved for
export."

He brought this matter up at the Physics Federation,
which Sabul seldom bothered to attend. Nobody there at-
tached importance to the issue of free communication
with the ideological enemy. Some of them lectured Shev-
ek for working in a field so arcane that there was, by his
own admission, nobody else on his own world competent
in it. "But it's only new," he said, which got him nowhere."

"If it's new, share it with us, not with the propertarians!"

"I've tried to offier a course every quarter for a year
now. You always say there isn't enough demand for it. Are
you afraid of it because it's new?"
129

That won him no friends. He left them in anger.

He went on writing letters to Urras, even when he
mailed none of them at all- The fact of writing for some-
one who might understand—who might have understood—
made it possible for him to write, to think. Otherwise it
was not possible.

The decads went by, and the quarters. Two or three
times a year the reward came: a letter from Atro or
another physicist in A-Io or Thu, a long letter, close-writ-
ten, close-argued, all theory from salutation to signature,
all intense abstruse meta-mathematical-ethico-cosmologi-
cal temporal physics, written in a language he could not
speak by men he did not know, fiercely trying to combat
and destroy his theories, enemies of his homeland, rivals,
strangers, brothers.

For days after getting a letter he was irascible and joy-
ful, worked day and night, foamed out ideas like a foun-
tain. Then slowly, with desperate spurts and struggles, he
came back to earth, to dry ground, ran dry.

He was finishing his third year at the Institute when
Gvarab died. He asked to speak at her memorial service,
which was held, as the custom was, in the place where the
dead person had worked: in this case one of the lecture
rooms in the Physics laboratory building. He was the only
speaker. No students attended; Gvarab had not taught for
two years. A few elderly members of the Institute came,
and Gvarab's middle-aged son, an agricultural chemist
from Northeast, was there. Shevek stood where the old
woman had used to stand to lecture. He told these people,
in a voice hoarsened by his now customary winter chest
cold, that Gvarab had laid the foundations of the science
of time, and was the greatest cosmologist who had ever
worked at the Institute. "We in physics have our Odo
now," he said. "We have her, and we did not honor her."
Afterwards an old woman thanked him, with tears in her
eyes. "We always took tenthdays together, her and me,
janitoring in our block, we used to have such good times
talking," she said, wincing in the icy wind as they came out
of the building. The agricultural chemist muttered civilites
and hurried off to catch a ride back to Northeast. In a
rage of grief, impatience, and futility, Shevek struck off
walking at random through the city.

Three years here, and he had accomplished what? A
130

book, appropriated by Sabul; five or six unpublished pa-
pers; and a funeral oration for a wasted life.

Nothing he did was understood. To put it more honestly,
nothing he did was meaningful. He was fulfilling no
necessary function, personal or social. In fact—it was not
an uncommon phenomenon in his field—he had burnt out
at twenty. He would achieve nothing further. He had come
up against the wall for good.

He stopped in front of the Music Syndicate auditorium
to read the programs for the decad. There was no concert
tonight. He turned away from the poster and came face to
face with Bedap.

Bedap, always defensive and rather nearsighted, gave
no sign of recognition. Shevek caught his arm.

"Shevekt By damn, it's you!" They hugged each other,
kissed, broke apart, hugged again. Shevek was over-
whelmed by love. Why? He had not even much liked
Bedap that last year at the Regional Institute. They had
never written, these three years. Their friendship was a
boyhood one, past. Yet love was there: flamed up as from
shaken coal.

They walked, talked, neither noticing where they went.
They waved their arms and interrupted each other. The
wide streets of Abbenay were quiet in the winter night. At
each crossing the dim streetlight made a pool of silver,
across which dry snow flurried like shoals of tiny fish, chas-
ing their shadows. The wind came bitter cold behind the
snow. Numbed lips and chattering teeth began to interfere
with conversation. They caught the ten o'clock omnibus,
the last, to the Institute; Bedap's domicile was out on the
east edge of the city, a long pull in the cold.

He looked at Room 46 with ironic wonder. "Shev, you
live like a rotten Urrasti profiteer."

"Come on, it's not that bad. Show me anything excre-
mental!" The room in fact contained just about what it
had when Shevek first entered it. Bedap pointed: "That
blanket"

"That was here when I came. Somebody handmade it,
and left it when they moved. Is a blanket excessive on a
night like this?"

"It's definitely an excremental color," Bedap said. "As a
functions analyst I must point out that there is no need
for orange. Orange serves no vital function in the social
131

organism at either the cellular or the organic level, and
certainly not at the holorganismic or most centrally ethical
level; in which case tolerance is a less good choice then
excretion. Dye it dirty green, brotheri What's all this
stuff?"

"Notes."

"In code?" Bedap asked, looking through a notebook
with the coolness Shevek remembered was characteristic
of him. He had even less sense of privacy—or private
ownership—than roost Anarresti. Bedap had never had a
favorite pencil that he carried around with him, or an old
shirt he had got fond of and hated to dump in the recycle
bin, and if given a present he tried to keep it out of regard
for the giver's feelings, but always lost it. He was conscious
of this trait and said it showed he was less primitive than
most people, an early example of the Promised Man, the
true and native Odonian. But he did have a sense of pri-
vacy. It began at the skull, his own or another's, and
from there on in it was complete. He never pried. He
said now, "Remember those fool letters we used to write in
code when you were on the afforestation project?"

"That isn't code, it's lotic."

"You've learned lotic? Why do you write in it?"

"Because nobody on this planet can understand what
I'm saying. Or wants to. The only one who did died three
days ago."

"Sabul's dead?"

"No. Gvarab. Sabul isn't dead. Fat chance!"

"What's the trouble?"

"The trouble with Sabul? Half envy, the other half in-
competence."

"I thought his book on causality was supposed to be
first-rate. You said so."

"I thought so. til! I read the sources. They're all Urrasti
ideas. Not new ones, either. He hasn't had a thought of
his own for twenty years. Or a bath."

"How are your thoughts?" asked Bedap, putting a hand
on the notebooks and looking at Shevek under his brows.
Bedap had small, rather squinting eyes, a strong face, a
thickset body. He bit his fingernails, and in years of doing
so had reduced them to mere strips across his thick, sensi-
tive fingertips.

132

"No good," said Shevek, sitting down on the bed plat-
form. "I'm in the wrong field."

Bedap grinned. "You?"

"I think at the end of this quarter I'll ask for reposting.**

'To what?"

"I don't care. Teaching, engineering. I've got to get out
of physics."

Bedap sat down in the desk chair, bit a fingernail, and
said, "That sounds odd."

"I've recognized my limitations,"

"I didn't know you had any. In physics, I mean. You had
all sorts of limitations and defects. But not in physics. I'm
no temporalist, I know. But you don't have to be able to
swim to know a fish, you don't have to shine to recognize
a star... ."

Shevek looked at his friend and said, blurted out, what
he had never been able to say clearly to himself: "I've
thought of suicide. A good deal. This year. It seems the
best way."

"It's hardly the way to come out on the other side of
suffering."

Shevek smiled stiffly. "You remember that?"

"Vividly. It was a very important conversation to me.
And to Takver and Tirin, I think."

"Was it?" Shevek stood up. There was only four steps'
pacing room, but he could not hold still. "It was important
to me then," he said, standing at the window. "But I've
changed, here. There's something wrong here. I don't know
what it is."

"I do," Bedap said. "The wall. You've come up against
the wall."

Shevek turned with a frightened look. "The wall?"

"In your case, the wall seems to be Sabul, and his
supporters in the science syndicates and the PDC. As for
me, I've been in Abbenay four decads. Forty days. Long
enough to see that in forty years here I'll accomplish noth-
ing, nothing at all, of what I want to do, the improvement
of science instruction in the learning centers. Unless things
are changed. Or unless I join the enemies."

"Enemies?"

'The little men- Sabul's friends! The people in power."

"What are you talking about. Dap? We have no power
structure."

133

"No? What makes Sabul so strong?"

"Not a power structure, a government. This isn't Urras,
after all!"

"No. We have no government, no laws, all right. But
as far as I can see, ideas never were controlled by laws
and governments, even on Urras. If they had been, how
would Odo have worked out hers? How would Odonian-
ism have become a world movement? The archists tried to
stamp it out by force, and failed. You can't crush ideas by
suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring
them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that's
precisely what our society is doingi Sabul uses you where
he can, and where he can't, he prevents you from publish-
ing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other
words, he has power over you. Where does he get it
from? Not from vested authority, there isn't any. Not from
intellectual excellence, he hasn't any. He gets it from the
innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opin-
ion! That's the power structure he's part of, and knows
how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that
rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind."

Shevek leaned his hands on the window sill, looking
through the dim reflections on the pane into the darkness
outside. He said at last, "Crazy talk, Dap."

"No, brother, I'm sane. What drives people crazy is
trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill
you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is
pain—you said that! But it's the lies, the evasions of
reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you
want to kill yourself."

Shevek turned around to face him. "But you can't seri-
ously talk of a government, herel"

"Tomar's Definitions: 'Government: The legal use of
power to maintain and extend power.' Replace 'legal' with
'customary,' and you've got Sabul, and the Syndicate of
Instruction, and the PDC."

•The PDC!"

"The PDC is, by now, basically an archistic bureau-
cracy."

After a moment Shevek laughed, not quite naturally,
and said, "Well, come on, Dap, this is amusing, but it's a
bit diseased, isn't it?"

"Shev, did you ever think that what the analogic mode
134

calls 'disease,' social disaffection, discontent, alienation,
that this might analogically also be called pain—what you
meant when you talked about pain, suffering? And that,
like pain, it serves a function in the organism?"

"No!" Shevek said, violently. "I was talking in personal,
in spiritual terms."

"But you spoke of physical suffering, of a man dying of
bums. And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing
their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds
submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage stran-
gled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is
freedom, change is life—is anything more basic to Odon-
ian thought than that? But nothing changes any more! Our
society is sick. You know it. You're suffering its sickness. Its
suicidal sickness!"

"That's enough. Dap. Drop it."

Bedap said no more. He began to bite his thumbnail,
methodically and thoughtfully.

Shevek sat down again on the bed platform and put his
head in his hands. There was a long silence. The snow had
ceased. A dry, dark wind pushed at the windowpane. The
room was cold; neither of the young men had taken off his
coat.

"Look, brother," Shevek said at last. "It's not our so-
ciety that frustrates individual creativity. It's the poverty
of Anarres- This planet wasn't meant to support civiliza-
tion. If we let one another down, if we don't give up our
personal desires to the common good, nothing, nothing on
this barren world can save us. Human solidarity is our only
resource."

"Solidarity, yes! Even on Urras, where food falls out of
the trees, even there Odo said that human solidarity is our
one hope. But we've betrayed that hope. We've let cooper-
ation become obedience. On Urras they have government
by the minority. Here we have government by the ma-
jority. But it is government! The social conscience isn't a
living thing any more, but a machine, a power machine,
controlled by bureaucrats!"

"You or I could volunteer and be lottery-posted to PDC
within a few decads. Would that turn us into bureaucrats,
bosses?"

"It's not the individuals posted to PDC, Shev. Most of
them are like us. All too much like us. Well-meaning,
135

na!ve. And it's not just PDC. It's anywhere on Anarrea.
Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, can-
neries, agricultural development and research stations,
factories, one-product communities—anywhere that func-
tion demands expertise and a stable institution. But that
stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the
early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on
the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully
then between administering things and governing people.
They did it so well that we forgot that the will to domi-
nance is as central in human beings as the impulse to
mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in
each new generation. Nobody's bom an Odonian any more
than he's bom civilized! But we've forgotten that. We
don't educate for freedom. Education, the most important
activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralis-
tic, authoritarian. Kids leam to parrot Odo's words as if
they were laws—the ultimate blasphemyi"

Shevek hesitated. He had experienced too much of the
kind of teaching Bedap was talking about, as a child, and
even here at the Institute, to be able to deny Bedap's ac-
cusation.

Bedap seized his advantage relentlessly. "It's always
easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy
and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval,
don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself
be governed."

"But it's not government. Dap! The experts and the
old hands are going to manage any crew or syndicate;

they know the work best. The work has to get done, after
alll As for PDC, yes, it might become a hierarchy, a pow-
er structure, if it weren't organized to prevent exactly that
Look how it's set upl Volunteers, selected by lot; a year
of training; then four years as a Listing; then out No-
body could gain power, in the archist sense, in a system
like that, with only four years to do it in."

"Some stay on longer than four years."

"Advisers? They don't keep the vote."

"Votes aren't important There are people behind the
scenes—"

"Come on! That's sheer paranoia! Behind the scenes—
bow? What scenes? Anybody can attend any PDC meet-
ing, and if he's an interested syndic, he can debate and
136

votel Are you trying to pretend that we have politicians
here?" Shevek was furious with Bedap; his prominent ears
were scarlet, his voice had got loud. It was late, not a
light showing across the quadrangle. Desar, in Room 45,
knocked on the wall for quiet

"I'm saying what you know," Bedap replied in a much
lowered voice. 'That it's people like Sabul who really run
PDC, and run it year after year.**

"If you know that," Shevek accused in a harsh whisper,
*then why havent you made it public? Why haven't you
called a criticism session in your syndicate, if you have
facts? If your ideas won't stand public examination, I
don't want them as midnight whispers."

Bedap's eyes had got very small, like steel beads.
"Brother," he said, **you are self-righteous. You always
were. Look outside your own damned pure conscience for
once! I come to you and whisper because I know I can
trust you, damn youl Who else can I talk to? Do I want to
end up like Tirin?"

"Like Turin?" Shevek was startled into raising his voice.
Bedap hushed him with a gesture towards the walL "What's
wrong with Tirin? Where is he?"

"In the Asylum on Segvina Island.'*

"In the Asylum?"

Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped
his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He
spoke quietly now, with reluctance.

Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you
left. It was funny—crazy—you know his kind of thing."
Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosen-
ing it from its queue. "It could seem anti-Odonian. if you
were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss.
He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one
before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and
tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang
foreman or manager down to size. Now they only use it to
tell an individual to stop thinking for temself. It was bad.
Tirin couldn't take it I think it really drove him a bit out
of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that.
He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational,
but always critical, always bitter. And he'd talk to any-
body that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified
as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one.
137

To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as
an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he
went."

"Tir never worked outdoors the whole time 1 knew
him," Shevek interrupted. "Since he was ten. He always
wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair."

Bedap paid no attention. "I don't really know what
happened down there. He wrote me several tunes, and
each time he'd been reposted. Always to physical labor,
in little outpost communities. He wrote that he was quit-
ting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see
me. He didn't come. He stopped writing. I traced him
through the Abbenay Labor Piles, finally. They sent me a
copy of his card, and the last entry was just. Therapy.
Segvina Island.' Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody?
Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the
Asylum for, beside that?"

"You don't get sent to the Asylum at all. You request
posting to it."

"Don't feed me that crap," Bedap said with sudden
rage. "He never asked to be sent there! They drove him
crazy and then sent him there. It's Tirin I'm talking about,
Tirin, do you remember him?"

"I knew him before you did. What do you think the
Asylum is—a prison? It's a refuge. If there are murder-
ers and chronic work-quitters there, it's because they
asked to go there, where they're not under pressure, and
safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep
talking about—'they*? They* drove him crazy, and so on.
Are you trying to say that the whole social system is
evil, that in fact 'they/ Tirin's persecutors, your enemies,
they.' are us—the social organism?"

"If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a
work-quitter, I don*t think I have anything else to say to
you," Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair.
There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that
Shevek's righteous wrath was stopped short,

Neither spoke for a while.

"I'd better go home," Bedap said, unfolding stiffly and
standing up.

"It's an hour's walk from here. Don't be stupid."

"Well, I thought... since ..."

"Don't be stupid."

138

"All right. Where's the shitteryT*

"Left, third door."

When he came back Bedap proposed to sleep on the
floor, but as there was no rug and only one warm blan-
ket, this idea was, as Shevek monotonously remarked,
stupid. They were both glum and cross; sore, as if they
had fist-fought but not fought all their anger out. Shevek
unrolled the bedding and they lay down. At the turning
out of the lamp a silvery darkness came into the room, the
half darkness of a city night when there is snow on. the
ground and light reflects faintly upward from the earth. It
was cold. Each felt the warmth of the other's body as
very welcome.

"I take it back about the blanket."

"Listen, Dap. I didn't mean to—"

"Oh, let's talk about it in the morning."

"Right."

They moved closer together. Shevek turned over onto
his face and fell asleep within two minutes. Bedap strug-
gled to hold on to consciousness, slipped into the warmth,
deeper, into the defenselessness, the trustfulness of sleep,
and slept. In the night one of them cried out aloud, dream-
ing. The other one reached his arm out sleepily, muttering
reassurance, and the blind warm weight of his touch out-
weighed all fear.

They met again the next evening and discussed whether
or not they should pair for a while, as they had when
they were adolescent. It had to be discussed, because She-
vek was pretty definitely heterosexual and Bedap pretty
definitely homosexual; the pleasure of it would be mostly
for Bedap. Shevek was perfectly willing, however, to re-
confirm the old friendship; and when he saw that the
sexual element of it meant a great deal to Bedap, was, to
him, a true consummation, then he took the lead, and
with considerable tenderness and obstinacy made sure that
Bedap spent the night with him again. They took a free
single in a domicile downtown, and both lived there for
about a decad; then they separated again, Bedap to his
dormitory and Shevek to Room 46. There was no strong
sexual desire on either side to make the connection last.
They had simply reasserted trust.

Yet Shevek sometimes wondered, as he went on seeing
139

Bedap almost daily, what it was he liked and trusted in his
friend. He found Bedap's present opinions detestable and
his insistence on talking about them tiresome. They argued
fiercely almost every time they met. They caused each
other a good deal of pain. Leaving Bedap, Shevek fre-
quently accused himself of merely clinging to an outgrown
loyalty, and swore angrily not to see Bedap again.

But the fact was that he liked Bedap more as a man
than he ever had as a boy. Inept, insistent, dogmatic,
destructive: Bedap could be all that; but he had attained
a freedom of mind that Shevek craved, though he hated
its expression. He had changed Shevek's life, and Shevek
knew it, knew that he was going on at last, and that it was
Bedap who had enabled him to go on. He fought Bedap
every step of the way, but he kept coming, to argue, to do
hurt and get hurt, to find—under anger, denial, and re-
jection—what he sought. He did not know what he sought.
But he knew where to look for it

It was, consciously, as unhappy a time for him as the
year that had preceded it. He was still getting no further
with his work; in fact he had abandoned temporal
physics altogether and backtracked into humble lab work,
setting up various experiments in the radiation laboratory
with a deft, silent technician as partner, studying sub-
atomic velocities. It was a well-trodden field, and his be-
lated entry into it was taken by his colleagues as an
admission that he had finally stopped trying to be original.
The Syndicate of Members of the Institute gave him a
course to teach, mathematical physics for entering stu-
dents. He got no sense of triumph from finally having
been given a course, for it was Just that: he had been
given it, been permitted it. He got little comfort from
anything. That the walls of his hard puritanical conscience
were widening out immensely was anything but a comfort.
He felt cold and lost. But he had nowhere to retreat to,
no shelter, so he kept coming farther out into the cold,
getting farther lost.

Bedap had made many friends, an erratic and disaf-
fected lot, and some of them took a liking to the shy man.
He felt no closer to them than to the more conventional
people he knew at the Institute, but he found their in-
dependence of mind more interesting. They preserved
autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming ec-
140

centric. Some of them were intellectual nuchnibi who had
not worked on a regular posting for years. Shevek dis-
approved of them severely, when he was not with them.

One of them was a composer named Salas. Salas and
Shevek wanted to learn from each other. Salas had little
math, but as long as Shevek could explain physics in the
analogic or experiential modes, he was an eager and in-
telligent listener. In the same way Shevek would listen to
anything Salas could tell him about musical theory, and
anything Salas would play him on tape or on his instru-
ment, the portative- But some of what Salas told him h&
found extremely troubling. Salas had taken a posting to a
canal-digging crew on the Plains of the Temae, east of
Abbenay. He came into the city on his three days off each
decad, and stayed with one girl or another, Shevek as-
sumed that he had taken the posting because he wanted a
bit of outdoor work for a change; but then he found that
Salas had never had a posting in music, or in anything but
unskilled labor.

"What's your listing at Divlab?" he asked, puzzled.

"General labor pool."

"But you're skilled! You put in six or eight years at the
Music Syndicate conservatory, didn't you? Why don't they
post you to music teaching?"

"They did. I refused. I won't be ready to teach for
another ten years. I'm a composer, remember, not a per-
former."

"But there must be postings for composers."

"Wherey

"In the Music Syndicate, I suppose."

"But the Music syndics don't like my compositions. And
nobody much else does, yet I can't be a syndicate all by
myself, can I?"

Salas was a bony little man, already bald on the upper
face and cranium; he wore what was left of his hair short,
in a silky beige fringe around the back of his neck and
chin. His smile was sweet, wrinkling his expressive face.
"You see, I don't write the way I was trained to write at
the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music." He smiled
more sweetly than ever. "They want chorales. I hate
chorales. They want wide-harmony pieces like Sessur
wrote. I hate Sessur's music. I'm writing a piece of cham-
ber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity
141

Principle. Five instruments each playing an independent
cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process
entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes a lovely
harmony. But they don't hear it. They won't hear it. They
canti"

Sbevek brooded a while. "If you called it The Joys of
Solidarity," he said, "would they hear it?"

"By damni" said Bedap, who was listening in. "That's
the first cynical thing you ever said in your life, Shev.
Welcome to the work crew!"

Salag laughed. 'They'd give it a hearing, but they'd
turn it down for taping or regional performance. It's not
in the Organic Style."

"No wonder I never heard any professional music while
I lived in Northsetting. But how can they justify this kind
of censorship? You write musici Music is a cooperative
art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest
form of social behavior we're capable of. It's certainly one
of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by
its nature, by the nature of any art, it's a sharing. The
artist shares, it's the essence of his act. No matter what
your syndics say, how can Divlab justify not giving you a
posting in your own field?"

"They don't want to share it," Salas said gleefully. "It
scares 'em."

Bedap spoke more gravely; "They can Justify it be-
cause music isn't useful. Canal digging is important, you
know; music's mere decoration. The circle has come right
back around to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitar-
ianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of in-
vention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian
ideal, we've thrown it all away. We've gone right back to
barbarism. If it's new, run away from it; if you cant eat
it, throw it away!"

Shevek thought of his own work and had nothing to
say. Yet he could not join in Bedap's criticism. Bedap had
forced him to realize that he was, in fact, a revolutionary;

but he felt profoundly that he was such by virtue of his
upbringing and education as an Odonian and an Anarresti.
He could not rebel against his society, because his society,
properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one,
an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength,
he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment
142

and without hope of reward: act from the center of one's
soul.

Bedap and some of his friends were taking off a decad
together, going on a hiking tour in the Ne Theras. He had
persuaded Shevek to come. Shevek liked the prospect of
ten days in the mountains, but not the prospect of ten
days of Bedap's opinions. Bedap's conversation was all too
much like a Criticism Session, the communal activity he
had always liked least, when everybody stood up and com-
plained about defects in the functioning of the community
and, usually, defects in the characters of the neighbors.
The nearer the vacation came the less he looked forward
to it. But he stuck a notebook in his pocket, so he could
get away and pretend to be working, and went.

They met behind the Eastern Points trucking depot
early in the morning, three women and three men. Shevek
did not know any of the women, and Bedap introduced
him to only two of them. As they set off on the road
toward the mountains he fell in beside the third one.
"Shevek," he said.

She said, "I know."

He realized that he must have met her somewhere be-
fore and should know her name. His ears got red,

"Are you being funny?" Bedap asked, moving in on the
left. 'Takver was at Northsetting Institute with us. She's
been living in Abbenay for two years. Haven't you two
seen each other here till now?"

"I've seen him a couple of times," the girl said, and
laughed at him. She had the laugh of a person who likes
to eat well, a big, childish gape. She was tall and rather
thin, with round arms and broad hips. She was not very
pretty; her face was swarthy, intelligent, and cheerful. In
her eyes there was a darkness, not the opacity of bright
dark eyes but a quality of depth, almost like deep, black,
fine ash, very soft. Shevek, meeting her eyes, knew that he
had committed an unforgivable fault in forgetting her and,
in the instant of knowing it, knew also that he had been
forgiven. That he was in luck. That -his luck had changed.

They started up into the mountains.

In the cold evening of the fourth day of their excursion
he and Takver sat on the bare steep slope above a gorge.
Forty meters below them a mountain torrent rattled down
the ravine among spraywet rocks. There was little running
143

water on Anarres; the water table was low in most places,
rivers were short. Only in the mountains were there
quick-running streams. The sound of water shouting and
clattering and singing was new to them.

They had been scrambling up and down such gorges
all day in the high country and were leg-weary. The rest
of their party were in the Wayshelter, a stone lodge built
by and for vacationers, and well kept up; the Ne Theras
Federative was the most active of the volunteer groups
that managed and protected the rather limited "scenic"
areas of Anarres. A firewarden who lived there in summer
was helping Bedap and the others put together a dinner
from the well-stocked pantries. Takver and Shevek had
gone out, in that order, separately, without announcing
their destination or, in fact, knowing it

He found her on the steep slope, sitting among the
delicate bushes of moonthom that grew like knots of lace
over the mountainsides, its stiff, fragile branches silvery in
the twilight. In a gap between eastern peaks a colorless
luminosity of the sky heralded moonrise. The stream was
noisy in the silence of the high, bare hills. There was no
wind, no cloud. The air above the mountains was like
amethyst, hard, clear, profound.

They had been sitting there some while without speak-
ing.

"I've never been drawn to a woman in my life as I have
been to you. Ever since we started this hike." Shevek*s
tone was cold, almost resentful.

"I didn't mean to spoil your vacation," she said, with
her large childish laugh, too loud for the twilight.

"It doesn't spoil itt"

'That's good-1 thought you meant it distracted you."

"Distracted! It's like an earthquake,"

"Thank you."

"It's not you," he said harshly- "It's me.*'

"That's what you think," she said.

There was a tongish pause.

"If you want to copulate," she said, "why havent you
asked me?"

"Because I'm not sure that's what I do want."

"Neither am I." Her smile was gone. "Listen," she said.
Her voice was soft, and had not much timbre; it had the
same furry quality as her eyes. "I ought to tell you." But
144

what she ought to tell him remained unsaid for quite a
while. He looked at her at last with such pleading ap-
prehension that she hastened to speak, and said in a rush,
"Well, all I mean is, I don't want to copulate with you
now. Or anybody."                                   /

"You've sworn off sex?"

"No!" she said with indignation, but no explanation.

"I might as well have," he said, flinging a pebble down
into the stream. "Or else I'm impotent. It's been half a
year, and that was just with Dap, Nearly a year, actually.
It kept getting more unsatisfying each time, till I quit
trying. It wasn't worth it. Not worth the trouble. And yet
I—I remember—I know what it ought to be."

"Well, that's it," said Takver. "I used to have an awful
lot of fun copulating, until I was eighteen or nineteen. It
was exciting, and interesting, and pleasure. But then ... I
don't know. Like you said, it got unsatisfying. I didn't
want pleasure. Not just pleasure. I mean."

"You want kids?"

"Yes, when the time comes.*'

He pitched another rock down into the stream, which
was fading into the shadows of the ravine leaving only its
noise behind, a ceaseless harmony composed of dishar-
monies.

"I want to get a job done," he said.

"Does being celibate help?"

"There's a connection. But I don't know what it is, it's
not causal. About the time sex began to go sour on me, so
did the work. Increasingly. Three years without getting
anywhere. Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye
can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the
merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless, waste
strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers. . . ."

Takver did not laugh; she gave a whimper of laughter,
as though it hurt. He tried to make out her face clearly.
Behind her dark head the sky was hard and clear.

"What's wrong with pleasure, Takver? Why don't you
want it?"

"Nothing's wrong with it. And I do want it- Only I dont
need it And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get
to what I do need."

"What is it you need?"

She looked down at the ground, scratching the surface
145

of a rock outcrop with her fingernail. She said nothing.
She leaned forward to pick a sprig of moonthom, b« did
not take it, merely touched it, felt the furred stem and
fragile leaf. Shevek saw in the tension of her movements
that she was trying with all her strength to contain or
restrain a storm of emotion, so that she could speak. When
she did, it was in a low voice and a little roughly. "I need
the bond," she said. "The real one. Body and mind and
all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less."

She glanced up at him with defiance, it might have
been hatred.

Joy was rising mysteriously in him, like the sound and
smell of the running water rising through the darkness. He
had a feeling of unlimitedness, of clarity, total clarity, as
if he had been set free. Behind Takver's head the sky was
brightening with moonrise; the far peaks floated clear and
silver. "Yes, thafs it," he said, without self-consciousness,
without any sense of talking to someone else; he said what
came into his head, meditatively. "I never saw it."

There was a little resentment still in Takver's voice.
"You never had to see it"

"Why not?"

"I suppose because you never saw the possibility of it."

*tWhat do you mean, the possibility?"

'The personi"

He considered this. They sat about a meter apart, hug-
ging their knees because it was getting cold. Breath came
to the throat like ice water. They could see each other's
breath, faint vapor in the steadily growing moonlight.

"The night I saw it," Takver said, "was the night before
you left Northsetting Institute. There was a party, you
remember. Some of us sat and talked all night. But that
was four years ago. And you didn't even know my name."
The rancor was gone from her voice; she seemed to want
to excuse him.

"You saw in me, then, what I've seen in you this last
four days?"

"I don't know. I can't tell. It wasn't Just sexual. I'd no-
ticed you before, that way. This was different; I sew you.
But I don't know what you see now. And I didn't really
know what I saw then. I didn't know you well at all. Only,
when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the
center. But you might have been quite different from what
146

I thought you were. That wouldn't be your fault, after
all," she added. "It's just that I knew what I saw in you
was what I needed. Not Just wantedl"

"And you've been in Abbenay for two years, and
didn't—"

"Didn't what? It was all on my side, in my head, you
didn't even know my name. One person can't make a
bond, after alll"

"And you were afraid that if you came to me I might
not want the bond."

"Not afraid. I knew you were a person who . .. wouldn't
be forced. . .. Well. yes, I was afraid. I was afraid of you.
Not of making a mistake. I knew it wasn't a mistake. But
you were—yourself. You aren't like most people, you
know. I was afraid of you because I knew you were my
equal I" Her tone as she ended was fierce, but in a moment
she said very gently, with kindness, "It doesn't really mat-
ter, you know, Shevek."

It was the first time he had heard her say his name. He
turned to her and said stammering, almost choking,
"Doesn't matter? First you show me—you show me what
matters, what really matters, what I've needed all my life
—and then you say it doesn't matter!"

They were face to face now, but they had not touched.
"Is it what you need, then?"

"Yes. The bond. The chance."

"Now—for lifer'

"Now and for life."

Life, said the stream of quick water down on the rocks
in the cold dark.

When Shevek and Takver came down from the moun-
tains, they moved into a double room. None was free in
the blocks near the Institute, but Takver knew of one
not far away in an old domicile in the north end of town.
In order to get the room they went to the block housing
manager—Abbenay was divided into about two hundred
local administrative regions, called blocks—a lens grinder
who worked at home and kept her three young children
at home with her. She therefore kept the housing files in a
shelf on top of a closet so the children wouldn't get at
them. She checked that the room was registered as vacant;

147

Shevek and Takver registered it as occupied by signing
their names.

The move was not complicated, either. Shevek brought
a box of papers, his winter boots, and the orange blanket.
Takver had to make three trips. One was to the district
clothing depository to get them both a new suit, an act
which she felt obscurely but strongly was essential to be-
ginning their partnership. Then she went to her old dormi-
tory, once for her clothes and papers, and again, with
Shevek, to bring a number of curious objects: complex
concentric shapes made of wire, which moved and changed
slowly and inwardly when suspended from the ceiling. She
had made these with scrap wire and tools from the craft-
supply depot, and called them Occupations of Uninhabited
Space. One of the room's two chairs was decrepit, so they
took it by a repair shop, where they picked up a sound one.
They were then furnished. The new room had a high ceil-
ing, which made it any and gave plenty of space for the
Occupations. The domicile was built on one of Abbenay's
low hills, and the room had a comer window that caught
the afternoon sunlight and gave a view of the city, the
streets and squares, the roofs, the green of parks, the
plains beyond.

Intimacy after long solitude, the abruptness of joy.
tried both Shevek's stability and Takver's. In the first few
decads he had wild swings of elation and anxiety; she had
fits of temper. Both were oversensitive and inexperienced.
The strain did not last, as they became experts in each
other. Their sexual hunger persisted as passionate delight,
their desire for communion was daily renewed because it
was daily fulfilled.

It was now clear to Shevek, and he would have thought
it folly to think otherwise, that his wretched years in this
city had all been part of hia present great happiness, be-
cause they had led up to it, prepared him for it. Everything
that had happened to him was part of what was happen-
ing to him now, Takver saw no such obscure concatena-
tions of effect/cause/effect, but then she was not a temporal
physicist She saw time naively as a road laid out. You
walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky,
you got somewhere worth getting to.

But when Shevek took her metaphor and recast it in his
terms, explaining that, unless the past and the future were
148

made part of the present by memory and intention,
there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go, she
nodded before he was half done. "Exactly," she said.
"That's what I was doing these last four years. It isnt all
luck. Just partly."

She was twenty-three, a half year younger than Shevek.
She had grown up in a farming community. Round Valley,
in Northeast. It was an isolated place, and before Takver
had come to the Institute in Northsetting she had worked
harder than most young Anarresti. There had been scarce-
ly enough people in Round Valley to do the jobs that had
to be done, but they were not a large enough community, or
productive enough in the general economy, to get high
priority from the Divlab computers. They had to look
after themselves. Takver at eight had picked straw and
rocks out of holum grain at the mill for three hours a day
after three hours of school. Little of her practical training
as a child had been towards personal enrichment: it had
been part of the community's effort to survive. At har-
vest and planting seasons everyone over ten and under
sixty had worked in the fields, all day. At fifteen she had
been in charge of coordinating the work schedules on the
four hundred farm plots worked by the community of
Round Valley, and had assisted the planning dietician in
the town refectory. There was nothing unusual in all this,
and Takver thought little of it, but it had of course formed
certain elements in her character and opinions. Shevek
was glad he had done his share of kleggich, for Takver was
contemptuous of people who evaded physical labor. "Look
at Tinan," she would say, "whining and howling because he
got a draft posting for four decads to a root-holum har-
vest. He's so delicate you'd think he was a fish egg! Has
he ever touched dirt?" Takver was not particularly chari-
table, and she had a hot temper.

She had studied biology at Northsetting Regional Insti-
tute, with sufficient distinction that she had decided to
come to the Central Institute for further study. After a
year she had been asked to join in a new syndicate that
was setting up a laboratory to study techniques of in-
creasing and improving the edible fish stocks in the three
oceans of Anarres. When people asked her what she did
she said, "I'm a fish geneticist." She liked the work; it
combined two things she valued: accurate, factual research
149

and a specific goal of increase or betterment, ^^thout such
work she would not nave been satisfied. Bin ft by no
means sufficed her. Most of what went on in Takver's mind
and spirit had little to do with fish genetics.

Her concern with landscapes and living creatures wag
passionate. This concern, feebly called "love of nature,"
seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than
love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has
never been cut They never got weaned from the universe.
They do not understand death as an enemy; they look for-
ward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to
see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She
became an extension of it, it of her.

She showed Shevek the sea-water tanks at the research
laboratory, fifty or more species of fish, large and small,
drab and gaudy, elegant and grotesque. He was fascinated
and a little awed.

The three oceans of Anarres were as full of animal life
as the land was empty of it. The seas had not been con-
nected for several million years, so their life forms had
followed insular courses of evolution. Their variety was
bewildering. It had never occurred to Shevek that life
could proliferate so wildly, so exuberantly, that indeed exu-
berance was perhaps the essential quality of life.

On land, the plants got on well enough, in their sparse
>and spiny fashion, but those animals that had tried air-
breathing had mostly given up the project as the planet's
Climate entered a millennial era of dust and dryness.
Bacteria survived, many of them lithophagous, and a few
hundred species of worm and crustacean.

Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow
ecology. If he fished, but not too greedily, and if he cul-
tivated, using mainly organic wastes for fertilizer, he
could fit in. But he could not fit anybody else in. There
was no grass for herbivores. There were no herbivores for
carnivores. There were no insects to fecundate flowering
plants; the imported fruit trees were all hand-fertilized. No
animals were introduced from Urras to imperil the delicate
balance of life, only the settlers came, and so well
scrubbed internally and externally that they brought a
minimum of their personal fauna and flora with them.
Not even the flea had made it to Anarres.

"I like marine biology," Takver said to Shevek in front
150

of the fish tanks, "because it's so complex, a real web.
This fish eats that fish eats small fry eat ciliates eat bac-
teria and round you go. On land, there's only three phyla,
all nonchordates—if you don't count man. It's a queer
situation, biologically speaking. We Anarresti are un-
naturally isolated. On the Old World there are eighteen
phyla of land animal; there are classes, like the insects,
that have so many species they've never been able to count
them, and some of those species have populations of
billions. Think of it: everywhere you looked animals,
other creatures, sharing the earth and air with you. You'd
feel so much more a part.'* Her gaze followed the curve of
a small blue fish's flight through the dim tank. Shevek,
intent, followed the fish's track and her thought's track. He
wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came
back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting
his physicist's arrogance to those small strange lives, to the
existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, beings
that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify
their ways to man.

Most Anarresti worked five to seven hours a day, with
two to four days off each decad. Details of regularity,
punctuality, which days off, and so on were worked out
between the individual and his work crew or gang or syn-
dicate or coordinating federative, on whichever level co-
operation and efficiency could best be achieved. Takver
ran her own research projects, but the work and the fish
had their own imperative demands; she spent from two to
ten hours a day at the laboratory, no days off. Shevek
had two teaching posts now, an advanced math course in a
learning center and another at the Institute. Both courses
were in the morning, and he got back to the room by
noon. Usually Takver was not back yet The building was
quite silent. The sunlight had not yet worked round to the
double window that looked south and west over the city
and the plains; the room was cool and shadowed. The
delicate concentric mobiles hanging at different levels
overhead moved with the introverted precision, silence,
mystery of the organs of the body or the processes of the
reasoning mind. Shevek would sit down at the table under
the windows and begin to work, reading or making notes
or calculating. Gradually the sunlight entered, shifted
across the papers on the table, across his hands on the
151

papers, and filled the room with radiance. And he worked.
The false starts and futilities of the past years proved
themselves to be groundwork, foundations, laid in the
dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully
but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nJ^iing of
his own but a knowledge working through him, using aim
as its vehicle, he built up the beautiful steadfast structure
of the Principles of Simultaneity.

Tafcver, like any man or woman who undertakes com-
panionship of the creator spirit, did not always have an
easy time of it Although her existence was necessary to
Shevek her actual presence could be a distraction. She
didnt like to get home too early, because he often quit
working when she got home, and she felt this to be wrong.
Later on, when they were middle-aged and stodgy, he
could ignore her, but at twenty-four he couldnt. Therefore
she arranged her tasks in the laboratory so that she did
not get home till midaftemoon. This was not a perfect
arrangement either, for he needed looking after. On
days when he had no classes, when she came in he might
have been sitting at the table for six or eight hours
straight. When he got up he would lurch with fatigue, his
hands would shake, and he was scarcely coherent The
usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears
them out, discards them, gets a new model For Takver
there were no replacements, and when she saw how hard
Shevek was used she protested. She would have cried out
as Odo*s husband, Asieo, did once, "For God's sake, girl.
can't you serve Truth a Uttte at a time?"—except that
she was the girl, and was unacquainted with God.

They would talk, go out for a walk or to the baths, then
to dinner at the Institute commons. After dinner there
were meetings, or a concert, or they saw their friends,
Bedap and Salas and their circle, Desar and others from
the Institute, Takver's colleagues and friends. But the
meetings and the friends were peripheral to them. Neither
social nor sociable participation was necessary to them;

their partnership was enough, and they could not hide the
fact It did not seem to offend the others. Rather the
reverse. Bedap, Salas, Desar, and the rest came to them
as thirsty people come to a fountain. The others were
peripheral to them: but they were central to the others.
They did nothing much; they were not more benevolent
152

than other people or more brilliant talkers; and yet their
friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing
them presents—the small offerings that circulated among
these people who possessed nothing and everything: a
handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded with crimson
garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters* Federation
workshop, a poem about love, a set of carved wooden but-
tons, a spiral shell from the Sorruba Sea. They gave the
present to Takver, saying, **Here, Shev might like this for
a paperweight," or to Shevek, saying, "Here, Tak might
like this color." In giving they sought to share in what
Shevek and Takver shared, and to celebrate, and to praise.

It was a long summer, warm and bright, the summer of
the 160th year of the Settlement of Anarres. Plentiful
rains in the spring bad greened the Plains of Abbenay
and laid the dust so that the air was unusually clear; the
sun was warm by day and at night the stars shone thick.
When the Moon was in the sky one could make out the
coastlines of its continents dearly, under the dazzling white
whorls of its clouds.

"Why does it look so beautiful?" Takver said, lying be-
side Shevek under the orange blanket, the light out. Over
them the Occupations of Uninhabited Space hung, dim;

out the window the full Moon hung, brilliant "When we
know that it's a planet just like this one, only with a better
dimate and worse people—when we know they're all
propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat
while others starve, and anyhow are all getting older and
having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on
their toes Just like people here .. . when we know all that,
why does it still look so happy—as if life there must be
so happy? I can't look at that radiance and imagine a
horrid little man with greasy sleeves and an atrophied
mind like Sabul living on it; I Just can't."

Their naked arms and breasts were moonlit The fine,
faint down on Takver's face made a blurring aureole over
her features; her hair and the shadows were black. Shevek
touched her silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at
the warmth of the touch in that cool light.

"H you can see a thing whole," he said, "it seems that
it's always beautiful. Planets, lives. . . . But close up, a
world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard
job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need dis-
153

tance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is,
is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life
is, is from the vantage point of death."

"That's all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and
be the moon—I don't want ill But I'm not goingTo stand
up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, '0
lovelyl' I want to see it whole right in the middle of it,
here, now. I don't give a hoot for eternity."

"It's nothing to do with eternity." said Shevek, grinning,
a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. "All you have to
do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I'll die, youll
die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun's
going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?"

"Ahl your talk, your damned philosophy!"

"Talk? It's not talk. It's not reason. It's hand's touch. I
touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which
is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when
I hold in my hands the light—"

"Don't be propertarian," Takver muttered.

"Dear heart, don't cry."

"I'm not crying. You are. Those are your tears."

•Tea cold. The moonlight's cold."

"Lie down."

A great shiver went through his body as she took him
in her arms.

"I am afraid, Takver," he whispered.

"Brother, dear soul, hush."

They slept in each other's amis that night, many nights.

154




Shevek found a letter in a pocket of the new, fleece-lined
coat he had ordered for winter from the shop in the
nightmare street. He had no idea how the letter had got
there. It certainly had not been in the mail delivered to
him thrice daily, which consisted entirely of manuscripts
and reprints from physicists all over Urras, invitations to
receptions, and artless messages from schoolcaildren. This
was a flimsy piece of paper stuck down to itself without
envelope; it bore no stamp or frank from any of the three
competing mail companies.

He opened it, vaguely apprehensive, and read: "V you
are an Anarchist why do you work with the power system
betraying your World and the Odonian Hope or are you
here to bring us that Hope- Suffering from injustice and re-
pression we look to the Sister World the light of freedom
in the dark night. Join with us your brothers!" There was
no signature, no address.

It shook Shevek both morally and intellectually, jolted
him, not with surprise but with a kind of panic. He knew
they were here: but where? He had not met one, not seen
one, he had not met a poor man yet. He had let a wall be
built around him and had never noticed. He had accepted
155

shelter, like a propertarian. He had been co-opted—just
as Chifoilisk had said.

But he did not know how to break down the wall- And if
he did, where could he go? The panic closed in OR him
tighter. To whom could he turn? He was surrounded on all
sides by the smiles of the rich.

"I'd like to talk with you, Efor."

"Yes sir. Excuse roe, sir, I make room set this down
here."

The servant handled the heavy tray deftly, nicked off
dish covers, poured out the bitter chocolate so it rose
frothing to the cup's rim without spill or splatter. He
clearly enjoyed the breakfast ritual and his adeptness at
it, and as clearly wanted no unusual interruptions in it.
He often spoke quite clear lotic, but now as soon as
Shevek said he wanted a talk Efor had slid into the
staccato of the city dialect. Shevek had learned to follow
It a little; the shift of sound values was consistent once
you caught it, but the apocopations left him groping. Half
the words were left out. It was like a code, he thought: as
Sf the "Nioti," as they called themselves, did not want to be
understood by outsiders.

The manservant stood awaiting Shevek's pleasure. He
knew—he had learned Sbevek's idiosyncrasies within the
first week—that Shevek did not want him to hold a chair,
or to wait on him while he ate. His erect attentive pose
was enough to wither any hope of informality.

"Will you sit down, Efor?"

"If you please sir," the man replied. He moved a chair
half an inch, but did not sit down in it.

"This is what I want to talk about. You know I don't
like to give you orders."

'Try manage things like you want sir without troubling
for orders."

"You do—I dont mean that. You know, in my country
nobody gives any orders."

"So I hear sir."

"Well, I want to know you as my equal, my brother.
You are the only one I know here who is not rich—not
one of the owners. I want very much to talk with you, I
want to know about your life—"

He stopped in despair, seeing the contempt on Efor's
156

lined face. He had made all the mistakes possible. Efor
took him for a patronizing, prying fool.

He dropped his hands to the table in a gesture of hope-
lessness and said, "Oh, hell, I am sorry, Eforl" I cannot
say what I mean. Please ignore it."

"Just as you say sir." Efor withdrew.

That was the end of that. The "unpropertied classes"
remained as remote from him as when he had read about
them in history at Northsetting Regional Institute.

Meanwhile, he had promised to spend a week with the
Oiies, between winter and spring terms.

Oiie had invited him to dinner several times since his
first visit, always rather stiffly, as if he were carrying out
a duty of hospitality, or perhaps a governmental order. In
his own house, however, though never wholly off his guard
with Shevek, he was genuinely friendly. By the second
visit his two sons had decided that Shevek was an old
friend, and their confidence in Shevek's response obviously
puzzled their father. It made him uneasy; he could not
really approve of it; but he could not say it was unjustified.
Shevek behaved to them like an old friend, like an elder
brother. They admired him, and the younger, Ini, came to
love him passionately, Shevek was kind, serious honest,
and told very good stories about the Moon; but there
was more to it than that. He represented something to
the child that Ini could not describe. Even much later in
his life, which was profoundly and obscurely influenced by
that childhood fascination, Ini found no words for it, only
words that held an echo of it: the word voyager, the word
exile.

The only heavy snow of the winter fell that week. She-
vek had never seen a snowfall of more than an inch or so.
The extravagance, the sheer quantity, of the storm exhila-
rated him. He reveled in its excess. It was too white, too
cold, silent, and indifferent to be called excremental by
the sincerest Odonian; to see it as other than an innocent
magnificence would be pettiness of soul. As soon as the sky
cleared he went out in it with the boys, who appreciated
it just as he did. They ran around in the big back garden
of the Oiie house, threw snowballs, built tunnels, castles,
and fortresses of snow.

Sewa Oiie stood with her sister-in-law Vea at the
window, watching the children, the man, and the little
157

otter playing. The otter had made himself a snowslide
down one wall of the snow castle and was excitedly to-
bogganing down it on his belly over and over again. The
boys' cheeks were fiery. The man, his long, rough, dun-grey
hair tied back with a piece of string and his ears ro^ with
cold, executed tunneling operations with energy. "Not
here!—Dig there!—Where's the shovel?—Ice in my pock-
et!"—the boys' high voices rang out continually,

'There is our alien," Sewa said, smiling.

'The greatest physicist alive," said the sister-in-law.
"How funny!"

When he came in, puffing and stamping off snow and
exhaling that fresh, cold vigor and well-being which only
people just in out of the snow possess, he was introduced
to the sister-in-law. He put out his big, hard, cold hand
and looked down at Vea with friendly eyes. "You are
Demaere's sister?" he said. "Yes, you look like him." And
this remark, which from anyone else would have struck
Vea as insipid, pleased her immensely. "He is a man,"
she kept thinking that afternoon, "a real man. What is it
about him?'*

Vea Doem Oiie was her name, in the loti mode; her
husband Doem was the head of a large industrial com-
bine and traveled a good deal, spending half of each year
abroad as a business representative of the government.
This was explained to Shevek, while he watched her- In
her, Demaere CHie's slightness, pale coloring, and oval
black eyes had been transmuted into beauty. Her breasts,
shoulders, and arms were round, soft, and very white.
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
158

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 pro-
tect me! You don't think there'll be wolves, do you? Will
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 laugfa with herself hut 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 really 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. 1
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."
159

"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?"                        A

"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. She designed a kind of
bearing they use in heavy machines, they still call it a
'shevek.'" He smiled again, more broadly. "There is a
good immortality!"

Vea shook her head. "Good Lord!" she said. "How do
you tell men from women?"

"Well, we have discovered methods...."

After a moment her soft, heavy laugh broke out. She
wiped her eyes, which watered in the cold air. "Yes, per-
haps you are uncouth! . . . Did they all take made-up
names, then, and learn a made-up language—everything
new?"

'The Settlers of Anarres? Yes. They were romantic peo-
ple, I suppose."

"And you're not?"

"No. We are very pragmatic."

"You can be both," she said.

He had not expected any subtlety of mind from her.
"Yes, that's true," he said.

"What's more romantic than your coming here, all
alone, without a coin in your pocket, to plead for your
people?"

"And to be spoiled with luxuries while I am here.**

"Luxuries? In university rooms? Good Lord! You poor
dear! Haven't they taken you anywhere decent?"

"Many places, but all the same. I wish I could come to
know N10 Esseia better. I have seen only the outside of
the city—the wrapping of the package." He used the
phrase because he had been fascinated from the start by
the Urrasti habit of wrapping everything up in clean, fancy
paper or plastic or cardboard or foil. Laundry, books,
vegetables, clothes, medicines, everything came inside
layers and layers of wrappings. Even packets of paper
were wrapped in several layers of paper. Nothing was to
touch anything else. He had begun to feel that he, too,
had been carefully packaged.

160

"I know. They made you go to the Historical Museum,
and take a tour of the Dobunnae Monument, and listen to
a speech in the Senate!" He laughed, because that had
been precisely the itinerary one day last summer. "I know!
They're so stupid with foreigners I shall see to it that you
see the real Nio!"

"I should like that."

"I know all kinds of wonderful people. I collect people.
Here you are trapped among all these stuffy professors
and politicians. . . ." She rattled on. He took pleasure in
her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and
the snow.

They came to the little station of Amoeno. She had
her return ticket; the train was due in any moment.

"Don't wait, you'll freeze."

He did not reply but just stood, bulky in the fleece-lined
coat, looking amiably at her.

She looked down at the cuff of her coat and brushed a
speck of snow off the embroidery.

"Have you a wife, Shevek?"

"No."

"No family at all?"

"Oh—yes. A partner; our children. Excuse me, I was
thinking of something else. A 'wife,' you see. I think of
that as something that exists only on Urras."

"What's a 'partner'?" She glanced up mischievously into
his face.

"I think you would say a wife or husband."

"Why didn't she come with you?"

She did not want to; and the younger child is only one
... no, two, now. Also—" He hesitated.

"Why didn't she want to come?"

"Well, there she has work to do, not here. If I had
known how she would like so many things here, 1 would
have asked her to come. But I did not. There is the ques-
tion of safety, you see."

"Safety here?"

He hesitated again, and finally said, "Also when I go
home."

"What will happen to you?" Vea asked, round-eyed. The
train was pulling over the hill outside town.

"Oh, probably nothing. But there are some who consider
me a traitor. Because I try to make friends with Urras,
161

you see. They might make trouble when I go home. I dont
want that for her and the children. We had a little of it
before I left. Enough."

"You'll be in actual danger, you mean?"

He bent toward her to hear, for the train wa^puUmg
into the station with a clatter of wheels and carriages. "I
don't know," he said, smiling. "You know, our trains look
very much like these? A good design need not change." He
went with her to a first-class carriage. Since she did not
open the door, he did. He put his head in after her,
looking around the compartment. "Inside they are not
alike, thought This is all private—for yourself?"

"Oh, yes. I detest second class. Men chewing maera-
gum and spitting. Do people chew maera on Anarres?
No, surely not. Oh, there are so many things I'd love to
know about you and your country!"

"I love to tell about it, but nobody asks.**

"Do let's meet again and talk about it, tbeni When
you're next in Nio, will you call me? Promise."

"I promise," he said good-naturedly.

"Ooodi I know you don't break promises. I don't know
anything about you yet, except that. I can see that. Good-
bye, Shevek." She put her gloved hand on his for a mo-
ment as he held the door. The engine gave its two-note
honk; he shut the door. and watched the train pull out
Vea's face a nicker of white and scarlet at the window.

He walked back to the Ones' in a very cheerful frame of
mind, and had a snowball battle with Ini until dark.

REVOLUTION IN BENBILI! DICTATOR FLEES1
REBEL LEADERS HOLD CAPiTALt
EMERGENCY SESSION IN CWG. POSSIBILITY
A-IO MAY INTERVENE.

The birdseed paper was excited into its hugest typeface.
Spelling and grammar fell by the wayside; it read like
Efor talking: "By last night rebels hold all west of Meskti
and pushing army hard...." It was the verbal mode of the
Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged un-
stable present tense.

Shevek read the papers and looked up a description of
Benbili in the CWG Encyclopedia. The nation was in
form a parliamentary democracy, in fact a military dic-
162

tatorship, run by generals. It was a large country in the
western hemisphere, mountains and arid savannahs, un-
derpopulated, poor. "I should have gone to Benbili,"
Shevek thought, for the idea of it drew him; be imagined
pale plains, the wind blowing. The news had stirred him
strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which
be had seldom turned on after finding that its basic func-
tion was advertising things for sale. Its reports, and those
of the official telefax in public rooms, were brief and dry:

a queer contrast to the popular papers, which shouted
Revolution! on every page.

General Havevert, the President, got away safe in his
famous armored airplane, but some lesser generals were
caught and emasculated, a punishment the Benbili tradi-
tionally preferred to execution. The retreating army
burned the fields and towns of their people as they went
Guerrilla partisans harried the army. The revolutionaries
in Meskti, the capital, opened the Jails, giving amnesty to
all prisoners. Reading that, Shevek's heart leapt. There
was hope, there was still nope. ... He followed the
news of the distant revolution with increasing intensity. On
the fourth day. watching a telefax broadcast of debate in
the Council of World Governments, he saw the loti am-
bassador to the CWG announce that A-Io, rising to the
support of the democratic government of Benbili, was
sending armed reinforcements to President-General Have-
vert.

The Benbfli revolutionaries were mostly not even armed.
The loti troops would come with guns, armored cars, air-
planes, bombs. Shevek read the description of their equip-
ment in the paper and felt sick at his stomach.

He felt sick and enraged, and there was nobody he
could talk to. Pae was out of the question. Atro was an
ardent militarist. Oiie was an ethical man, but his private
insecurities, his anxieties as a property owner, made him
cling to rigid notions of law and order. He could cope with
his personal liking for Shevek only by refusing to admit
that Shevek was an anarchist. The Odonian society called
itself anarchistic, he said, but they were in fact mere
primitive populists whose social order functioned without
apparent government because there were so few of them
and because they had no neighbor states. When their
property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would
163

either wake up to reality or be wiped out. The Benbili
rebels were waking up to reality now: they were finding
freedom is no good if you have no guns to back it up. He
explained this to Shevek in the one discussion they had
on the subject. It did not matter who governed, or Aught
they governed, the Benbilis: the politics of reality con-
cerned the power struggle between A-Io and Thu.

"The politics of reality," Shevek repeated. He looked at
Oiie and said, "That is a curious phrase for a physicist to
use."

"Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal
with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of
the world."

"You put your petty miserable 'laws' to protect wealth,
your 'forces' of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with
the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought
better of your mind, Demaere!"

Oue shrank from that thunderbolt of contempt. He said
no more, and Shevek said no more, but Oiie never forgot
it. It lay imbedded in his mind thereafter as the most
shameful moment of his life. For if Shevek the deluded
and simple-minded utopist had silenced him so easily, that
was shameful; but if Shevek the physicist and the man
whom he could not help liking, admiring, so that he longed
to deserve his respect, as if it were somehow a finer grade
of respect than any currently available elsewhere—if this
Shevek despised him. then the shame was intolerable,
and he must hide it, lock it away the rest of his life in the
darkest room of his soul.

The subject of the Benbili revolution had sharpened
certain problems for Shevek also: particularly the problem
of his own silence,

It was difficult for him to distrust the people he was
with. He had been brought up in a culture that relied
deliberately and constantly on human solidarity, mutual
aid. Alienated as he was in some ways from that culture,
and alien as he was to this one, still the lifelong habit re-
mained: he assumed people would be helpful. He trusted
them.

But Chifoilisk's warnings, which he had tried to dismiss,
kept returning to him. His own perceptions and instincts
reinforced them. Like it or not, he must leam distrust. He
164

must be silent; he must keep his property to himself, he
must keep his bargaining power.

He said little, these days, and wrote down less. His desk
was a moraine of insignificant papers; his few working
notes were always right on his body, in one of his numer-
ous Urrasti pockets. He never left his desk computer with-
out clearing it

He knew that he was very near achieving the General
Temporal Theory that the loti wanted so badly for their
spacefiight and their prestige. He knew also that he had
not achieved it and might never do so. He had never ad-
mitted either fact clearly to anyone.

Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in
his grasp. He bad the equations. Sabul knew he had them,
and had offered him reconciliation, recognition, in return
for the chance to print them and get in on the glory. He
had refused Sabul, but it had not been a grand moral
gesture. The moral gesture, after all, would have been to
give them to his own press at the Syndicate of Initiative,
and he hadn't done that either. He wasn't quite sure he was
ready to publish. There was something not quite right,
something that needed a little refining. As he had been
working ten years on the theory, it wouldn't hurt to take
a little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth.

The little something not quite right kept looking wrong-
er. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right
through the foundations. . . . The night before he left
Anarres he had bumed every paper he had on the General
Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a
year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them.

Or had he been bluffing himself?

It was quite possible that a general theory of temporality
was an illusory goal. It was also possible that, though
Sequency and Simultaneity might someday be unified in a
general theory, he was not the man to do the job. He had
been trying for ten years and had not done it. Mathema-
ticians and physicists, athletes of intellect, do their great
work young. It was more than possible—probable—that
he was burnt out, finished.

He was perfectly aware that he had had the same low
moods and intimations of failure in the periods iust before
his moments of highest creativity. He found himself trying
to encourage himself with that fact, and was furious at
165

his own naivete. To interpret temporal order as causal
order was a pretty stupid thing for a chronosophist to do.
Was he senile already? He had better simply get to work
on the small but practical task of refining the concept of
interval. It might be useful to someone else.          ^

But even in that, even in talking with other physicists
about it, he felt that he was holding something back. And
they knew he was.

He was sick of holding back, sick of not talking, not
talking about the revolution, not talking about physics, not
talking about anything.

He crossed the campus on his way to a lecture. The
birds were singing in the newly leafed trees. He had not
heard them sing all winter, but now they were at it, pour-
ing it out, the sweet tunes. Ree-dee, they sang, tee-dee.
This is my propertee-tee, this is my territoree-ree-ree, it
belongs to mee, mee.

Shevek stood still for a minute under the trees, listening.

Then he turned off the path, crossed the campus in a
different direction, towards the station, and caught a
morning train to Nio Esseia. There had to be a door open
somewhere on this damned planet!

He thought, as he sat in the train, of trying to get out
of A-Io: of going to Benbili, maybe. But he did not take
the thought seriously. He would have to ride on a ship or
airplane, he would be traced and stopped. The only place
where he could get out of sight of his benevolent and pro-
tective hosts was in their own big city, under their noses.

It was not an escape. Even if he did get out of the
country, be would still be locked in, locked in Urras. You
couldn't call that escape, whatever the archists, with their
mystique of national boundaries, might call it. But he sud-
denly felt cheerful, as he had not for days, when he
thought that his benevolent and protective hosts might
think, for a moment, that he had escaped.

It was the first really warm day of spring. The fields
were green, and flashed with water. On the pasture lands
each stock beast was accompanied by her young. The in-
fant sheep were particularly charming, bouncing like white
elastic balls, their tails going round and round. In a pen by
himself the herd sire, ram or bull or stallion, heavy-
necked, stood potent as a thundercloud, charged with
generation. Gulls swept over brimming ponds, white over
166

blue, and white clouds brightened the pale blue sky. The
branches of orchard trees were tipped with red, and a
few blossoms were open, rose and white. Watching from
the train window Shevek found his restless and rebellious
mood ready to defy even the day's beauty. It was an un-
Just beauty. What had the Urrasti done to deserve it? Why
was it given to them, so lavishly, so graciously, and so
little, so very little, to his own people?

Fm thinking like an Urraati, he said to himself. Like a
damned propertarian. As if deserving meant anything. As
if one could earn beauty, or life! He tried to think of
nothing at all, to let himself be borne forward and to
watch the sunlight in the gentle sky and the little sheep
bouncing in the fields of spring.

Nio Esseia, a city of five million souls, lifted its delicate
glittering towers across the green marshes of the Estuary
as if it were built of mist and sunlight. As the train swung
in smoothly on a long viaduct the city rose up taller,
brighter, solider, until suddenly it enclosed the train en-
tirely in the roaring darkness of an underground approach,
twenty tracks together, and then released it and its pas-
sengers into the enormous, brilliant spaces of the Central
Station, under the central dome of ivory and azure, said
to be the largest dome ever raised on any world by the
hand of man.

Shevek wandered across acres of polished marble under
that immense ethereal vault, and came at last to the long
array of doors through which crowds of people came and
went constantly, all purposeful, all separate- They all
looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety
before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was
it because, no matter how much money they had, they
always had to worry about making more, lest they die
poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money
they had, there was always somebody who had less? What-
ever the cause, it gave all the faces a certain sameness,
and he felt very much alone among them. In escaping his
guides and guards he had not considered what it might be
like to be on one's own in a society where men did not
trust one another, where the basic moral assumption was
not mutual aid, but mutual aggression. He was a little
frightened.

He had vaguely imagined wandering about the city and
167

getting into conversation with people, members of the
unpropertied class, if there still was such a thing, or the
working classes, as they called them. But all these people
hurried along, on business, wanting no idle talk, no waste
of their valuable time. Their hurry infected him. He Ast
go somewhere, he thought, as he came out into the sun-
light and the crowded magnificence of Moie Street
Where? The National Library? The Zoo? But he did not
want to sightsee.

Irresolute, he stopped in front of a shop near the sta-
tion that sold newspapers and trinkets. The headline of the
paper said THU SENDS TROOPS TO AID BENBILI REBELS, but
he did not react to it He looked at the color photographs
in the rack, instead of tfae newspaper. It occurred to him
that he had no mementos of Urras. When one traveled
one ought to bring back a souvenir. He liked the photo-
graphs, scenes of A-Io; the mountains he had climbed,
the skyscrapers of Nio, the university chapel (almost the
view out his window), a farm girl in pretty provincial
dress, the towers of Rodarred, and the one that had first
caught his eye, a baby sheep in a flowered meadow, kick-
ing its legs and, apparently, laughing. Little Pilun would
like that sheep. He selected one of each card and took
them to the counter. "And five's fifty and the lamb makes
it sixty; and a map, right you are, sir, one forty. Nice
day, spring's here at last, isn't it, sir? Nothing smaller
than that, sir?" Shevek had produced a twenty-unit bank
note. He fumbled out the change he had received when
he bought his ticket, and, with a little study of the de-
nominations of the bills and coins, got together one unit
forty. "That's right, sir. Thank you and have a pleasant
day!"

Did the money buy the politeness, as well as the post-
cards and the map? How polite would the shopkeeper
have been if he had come in as an Anarresti came in to a
goods depository: to take what he wanted, nod to the
registrar, and walk out?

No use, no use thinking this way. When in the Land of
Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like
one, act like one, be one.

There were no parks in downtown Nio, the land was
far too valuable to waste on amenity. He kept getting
deeper into the same great, glittering streets that he had
168

been taken through many times. He came to Saemtenevia
Street and crossed it hurriedly, not wanting a repetition of
the daylight nightmare. Now be was in the commercial
district. Banks, office buildings, government buildings. Was
all Nio Esseia this? Huge shining boxes of stone and glass,
immense, ornate, enormous packages, empty, empty.

Passing a ground-floor window marked Art Gallery, he
turned in, thinking to escape the moral claustrophobia of
the streets and find the beauty of Urras again in a muse-
um. But all the pictures in the museum had price tickets
attached to their frames. He stared at a skillfully painted
nude. Her ticket read 4,000 IMU. "That's a Fei Feite,"
said a dark man appearing noiselessly at his elbow. "We
had five a week ago. Biggest thing on the art market be-
fore long. A Feite is a sure investment, sir."

"Four thousand units is the money it costs to keep two
families alive for a year in this city," Shevek said.

The man inspected him and said drawling, ^es, weB.
you see, sir, that happens to be a work of art."

"Art? A man makes art because he has to. Why was
that made?"

"You're an artist, I take it," the roan said, now with
open insolence.

"No, I am a man who knows shit when he sees it!" The
dealer shrank back. When he was out of Shevek's reach,
he began to say something about the police. Shevek
grimaced and strode out of the shop. Halfway down the
block he stopped. He couldn't go on this way.

But where could he go?

To someone ... to someone, another person. A human
being. Someone who would give help, not sell it Who?
Where?

He thought of Oiie'g children, the little boys who liked
him, and for some time could think of no one else. Then
an image rose in his mind, distant smau, and clear: Oiie's
sister. What was her name? Promise youll caU, she had
said, and since then she bad twice written him invitations
to dinner parties, in a bold childish hand, on thick, sweet-
scented paper. He had ignored them, among all the in-
vitations from strangers. Now he remembered them.

He remembered at the same time the other message,
the one that had appeared inexplicably in his coat pock*
169

et: Join with us your brothers. But he could not find any
brothers, on Un-as.

He went into the nearest shop. It was a sweetshop, all
golden scrolls and pink plaster, with rows of glass rases
full of boxes and tins and baskets of candies and con-
fections. pink, brown, cream, gold. He asked the woman
behind the cases if she would help him find a telephone
number. He was now subdued, after his fit of bad temper
in the art dealer's, and so humbly ignorant and foreign
that the woman was won over. She not only helped him
look up the name in the ponderous directory of telephone
numbers, but placed the call for him on the shop phone.

"Hello?"

He said, "Shevek." Then he stopped. The telephone to
him was a vehicle of urgent needs, notifications of deaths,
births, and earthquakes. He had no idea what to say.

"Who? Shevek? Is it really? How dear of you to call! I
don't mind waking up at all if it's you."

"You were sleeping?"

"Sound asleep, and I'm still in bed. It's lovely and
warm. Where on earth are you?"

"On Kae Sekae Street, I think."

"Whatever for? Come on out. What time is it? Good
Lord, nearly noon. I know, I'll meet you halfway. By the
boat pool in the Old Palace gardens. Can you find it?
Listen, you must stay, I'm having an absolutely paradisial
party tonight." She rattled on awhile; he agreed to all she
said. As he came out past the counter the shopwoman
smiled at him. "Better take her a box of sweets, hadn't
you, sir?"

He stopped. "Should I?"

"Never does any barm, sir."

There was something impudent and genial in her voice.
The air of the shop was sweet and warm, as if all the
perfumes of spring were crowded into it. Shevek stood
there amidst the cases of pretty little luxuries, tall, heavy,
dreamy, like'the heavy animals in their pens, the rams
and bulls stupefied by the yearning warmth of spring.

"Ill make you up just the thing," the woman said, and
she filled a little metal box, exquisitely enameled, with
miniature leaves of chocolate and roses of spun sugar.
She wrapped the tin in tissue paper, put the packet in a
silvered cardboard box, wrapped the box in heavy rose-
170

colored paper, and tied it with green velvet ribbon. In all
her deft movements a humorous and sympathetic com-
plicity could be sensed, and when she handed Shevek the
completed package, and he took it with muttered thanks
and turned to go, there was no sharpness in her voice as
she reminded him, "That's ten sixty, sir." She might even
have let him go, pitying him, as women will pity strength;

but he came back obediently and counted out the money.

He found his way by subway train to the gardens of the
Old Palace, and to the boat pool, where charmingly
dressed children sailed toy ships, marvelous little craft with
silken cordage and brasswork like jewelry. He saw Vea
across the broad, bright circle of the water and went
around the pool to her, aware of the sunlight, and the
spring wind, and the dark trees of the park putting forth
their early, pale-green leaves.

They ate lunch at a restaurant in the park, on a terrace
covered with a high glass dome. In the sunlight inside the
dome the trees were in full leaf, willows, hanging over a
pool where fat white birds paddled, watching the diners
with indolent greed, awaiting scraps. Vea did not take
charge of the ordering, making it clear that Shevek was in
charge of her, but skillful waiters advised him so smoothly
that he thought he had managed it all himself; and for-
tunately he had plenty of money in his pocket. The food
was extraordinary. He had never tasted such subtleties of
flavor. Used to two meals a day, he usually skipped the
lunch the Urrasti ate, but today he ate right through it,
while Vea delicately picked and pecked. He had to stop
at last, and she laughed at his rueful look.

"I ate too much."

"A little walk might help."

It was a very little walk: a slow ten-minute stroll over
the grass, and then Vea collapsed gracefully in the shade
of a high bank of shrubs, all bright with golden flowers.
He sat down by her. A phrase Takver used came into his
mind as he looked at Vea's slender feet, decorated with
little white shoes on very high heels. "A body profiteer,"
Takver called women who used their sexuality as a weap-
on in a power struggle with men. To look at her, Vea was
the body profiteer to end them all. Shoes, clothes, cos-
metics, jewels, gestures, everything about her asserted
provocation. She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a
171

female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human
being. She incarnated all the sexuality the loti repressed
into their dreams, their novels and poetry, their endless
paintings of female nudes, their music, their architectuiiB
with its curves and domes, their candies, their baths, the&
mattresses. She was the woman in the table.

Her head, entirely shaven, had been dusted with a talc
containing tiny flecks of mica dust, so that a faint glitter
obscured the nakedness of the contours. She wore a filmy
shawl or stole, under which the forms and texture of her
bare arms showed softened and sheltered. Her breasts
were covered: loti women did not go outside with naked
breasts, reserving their nudity for its owners. Her wrists
were laden with gold bracelets, and in the hollow of her
throat a single jewel shone blue against the soft skin.

"How does that stay there?*'

"What?" Since she could not see the jewel herself she
could pretend to be unaware of it, obliging him to point,
perhaps to bring his hand up over her breasts to touch the
jewel. Shevek smiled, and touched it. "It is glued on?"

"Oh, that. No, I've got a tiny little magnet set in there,
and it's got a tiny little bit of metal on the back, or is it
the other way round? Anyhow, we stick together."

"You have a magnet under your skin?" Shevek inquired
with unsophisticated distaste.

Yea smiled and removed the sapphire so he could see
that there was nothing but the tiniest silver dimple of a
scar. "You do disapprove of me so totally—it's refreshing.
I feel that whatever I say or do, I can*t possibly lower
myself in your opinion, because I've already reached bot-
tom!"

"That is not so," he protested. He knew she was play-
ing, but knew few of the rules of the game.

"No, no; I know moral horror when I see it. Like
this." She put on a dismal scowl; they both laughed. "Am
I so different from Anarresti women, really?"

"Oh, yes, really."

"Are they all terribly strong, with muscles? Do they
wear boots, and have big flat feet, and sensible clothing,
and shave once a month?"

'They don't shave at all."

"Never? Not anywhere? Oh, Lord! Let's talk about
something else."

172

"About you." He leaned on the grassy bank, near
enough to Vea that he was surrounded by the natural and
artificial perfumes of her body. "I want to know, is an
Urrasti woman content to be always inferior?"

"Inferior to whom?"

"To men."

"Oh—thatt What makes you think I am?"

"It seems that everything your society does is done by
men. The industry, arts, management, government, deci-
sions. And all your life you bear the father's name and
the husband's name. The men go to school and you don't
go to school; they are all the teachers, and judges, and
police, and government, aren't they? Why do you let them
control everything? Why don't you do what you like?"

"But we do. Women do exactly as they like. And they
don't have to get their hands dirty, or wear brass helmets,
or stand about shouting in the Directorate, to do it."

"But what is it that you do?"

"Why, run the men, of course! And you know, it's per-
fectly safe to tell them that, because they never believe it
They say, *Haw haw, funny little woman!' and pat your
head and stalk off with their medals jangling, perfectly
self-content."

"And you too are self-content?"

"Indeed I am."

"I don't believe it."

"Because it doesn't fit your principles. Men always have
theories, and things always have to fit them."

"No, not because of theories, because I can see that
you are not content. That you are restless, unsatisfied,
dangerous."

"Dangerous!" Vea laughed radiantly. "What an utterly
marvelous compliment! Why am I dangerous, Shevek?"

"Why, because you know that in the eyes of men you
are a thing, a thing owned, bought, sold. And so you think
only of tricking the owners, of getting revenge—"

She put her small hand deliberately on his mouth.
"Hush," she said. "I know you don't intend to be vulgar.
I forgive you. But that's quite enough."

He scowled savagely at the hypocrisy, and at the reali-
zation that he might really have hurt her. He could still
feel the brief touch of her hand on his lips. "1 am sor-
ry!" he said.

173

"No, no. How can you understand, coming from the
Moon? And you're only a man, anyway. . . . I'll tell you
something, though. If you took one of your 'sisters* up
there on the Moon, and gave her a chance to take off her
boots, and have an oil bath and a depilation, and put <^ a
pair of pretty sandals, and a belly jewel, and perfume,
she'd love it. And you'd love it too! Oh, you would! But
you won't, you poor things with your theories. All broth-
ers and sisters and no fun!"

"You are right," Shevek said, "No fun. Never. All day
long on Anarres we dig lead in the bowels of the mines,
and when night comes, after our meal of three holum
grains cooked in one spoonful of brackish water, we
antiphonally recite the Sayings of Odo, until it is time to
go to bed. Which we all do separately, and wearing
boots."

His fluency in lotic was not sufficient to permit him the
word flight this might have been in his own language,
one of his sudden fantasies which only Takver and Sadik
had heard often enough to get used to; but, lame as it was,
it startled Vea. Her dark laugh broke out, heavy and
spontaneous. "Good Lord, you're funny, too! Is there any-
thing you aren't?'*

"A salesman,'* he said.                            ^
She studied him, smiling. There was something pro-
fessional, actress-like, in her pose. People do not usually
gaze at one another intently at very close range, unless
they are mothers with infants, or doctors with patients, or
lovers.

He sat up. "I want to walk more," he said.
She reached up her hand for him to take and help her
rise. The gesture was indolent and inviting, but she said
with an uncertain tenderness in her voice, "You really are
like a brother.... Take my hand. Ill let you go again!"

They wandered along the paths of the great garden.
They went into the palace, preserved as a museum of the
ancient times of royalty, as Vea said she loved to look at
the jewelry there- Portraits of arrogant lords and princes
stared at them from the brocade-covered walls and the
carven chimneypieces. The rooms were full of silver, gold,
crystal, rare woods, tapestries, and jewels. Guards stood
behind the velvet ropes. The guards' black and scarlet
uniforms consorted well with the splendors, the hangings
174

of spun gold, the counterpanes of woven feathers, but
their faces did not match; they were bored faces, tired,
tired of standing all day among strangers doing a useless
task. Shevek and Vea came to a glass case in which lay
the cloak of Queen Teaea, made of the tanned skins of
rebels flayed alive, which that terrible and defiant woman
had worn when she went among her plague-stricken peo-
ple to pray God to end the pestilence, fourteen hundred
years ago. "It looks awfully like goatskin to me," Vea
said, examining the discolored, time-tattered rag in the
glass case. She glanced up at Shevek. "Are you all right?"

"I think I would like to go outside this place."

Once outside in the garden his face became less white,
but he looked back at the palace walls with hatred. "Why
do you people cling to your shame?" he said.

"But it's all just history. Things like that couldn't hap-
pen now!"

She took him to a matinee at the theater, a comedy
about young married people and their mothers-in-law, full
of jokes about copulation which never mentioned copula-
tion. Shevek attempted to laugh when Vea did. After that
they went to a downtown restaurant, a place of incredible
opulence. The dinner cost a hundred units. Shevek ate
very little of it, having eaten at noon, but he gave in to
Vea's urging and drank two or three glasses of wine,
which was pleasanter than he had expected it to be, and
seemed to have no deleterious effect on his thinking. He
had not enough money to pay for the dinner, but Vea
made no offer to share the cost, merely suggesting that he
write a check, which he did. They then took a hired car
to Vea's apartment; she also let him pay the driver. Could
it be, he wondered, that Vea was actually a prostitute,
that mysterious entity? But prostitutes as Odo wrote of
them were poor women, and surely Vea was not poor;

"her" party, she had told him, was being got ready by
"her" cook, "her" maid, and "her" caterer. Moreover men
at the University spoke of prostitutes contemptuously as
dirty creatures, while Vea, despite her continual allure-
ments, displayed such sensitivity to open talk about any-
thing sexual that Shevek watched his language with her as
he might have done, at home, with a shy child of ten. All
together, he did not know what exactly Vea was.

Vea's rooms were large and luxurious, with glittering
175

•Jay

views of the lights of Nio, and furnished entirely in white,
even the carpeting. But Shevek was getting callous to
luxury, and besides was extremely sleepy. The guests were
not due to arrive for an hour. While Vea was changing
her clothes, he fell asleep in a huge white armchair iAhe
living room. The maid rattling something on the table
woke him in time to see Vea come back in, dressed now
in loti formal evening wear for women, a full-length
pleated skirt draped from the hips, leaving the whole torso
naked. In her navel a little jewel glittered, just as in the
pictures he had seen with Tirin and Bedap a quarter-cen-
tury ago at the Northsetting Regional Institute of Science,
just so. ... Half awake and wholly roused, be stared at
her.

She gazed back at him, smiling a little.

She sat down on a low, cushioned stool near him, so
she could look up into his face. She arranged her white
skirt over her ankles, and said, "Now, tell me how it really
is between men and women on Anarres.**

It was unbelievable. The maid and the caterer's man
were both in the room; she knew he had a partner, and
he knew she did", and not a word about copulating had
passed between them. Yet her dress, movements, tone—
what were they but the most open invitation?

"Between a man and a woman there is what they want
there to be between them," he said, rather roughly. "Each,
and both."

"Then it's true, you really have no morality?*' she asked,
as if shocked but delighted.

"I don't know what you mean. To hurt a person there
is the same as to hurt a person here.'*

"You mean you have all the same old rules? You see, I
believe that morality is just another superstition, like reli-
gion. It's got to be thrown out."

"But my society," he said, completely puzzled, "is an
attempt to reach it. To throw out the moralizing, yes—the
rules, the laws, the punishments—so that men can see
good and evil and choose between them,"

"So you threw out all the do's and don'ts- But you
know, I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You
threw out the priests and Judges and divorce laws and all
that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just
stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it's still there.
176

You're Just as much slaves as ever! You arent really
free."

"How do you know?"

"I read an article in a magazine about Odonianism,"
she said. "And we've been together all day. I don't know
you, but I know some things about you. I know that
you've got a—a Queen Teaea inside you, right^ inside that
hairy head of yours- And she orders you around just like
the old tyrant did her serfs. She says, 'Do this!' and you
do, and 'Donti' and you don't."

"That is where she belongs," he said, smiling. "Inside
my head."

"No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could
rebel gainst her. You would havet Your great-great-
grandfather did; at least he ran off to the Moon to get
away. But he took Queen Teaea with him, and you've
still got her!"

"Maybe. But she has learned, on Anarres, that if she
tells me to hurt another person, I hurt myself."

"The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strong-
est wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover
up the hate with pretty words!"

"Your civilization, perhaps. Ours hides nothing. It is all
plain. Queen Teaea wears her own skin, there. We follow
one law, only one, the law of human evolution."

"The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!"

"Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social
species, are those who are most social. In human terms,
most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy,
on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no
strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only
weakness."

"I don't care about hurting and not hurting. I don't care
about other people, and nobody else does, either. They
pretend to. I don't want to pretend. I want to be free'"

"But Vea," he began, with tenderness, for the plea for
freedom moved him very much, but the doorbell rang.
Vea stood up, smoothed her skirt, and advanced smiling
to welcome her guests.

During the next hour thirty or forty people came. At
first Shevek felt cross, dissatisfied, and bored. It was Just
another of the parties where everybody stood about with
glasses in their hands smiling and talking loudly. But pres-
177

ently it became more entertaining. Discussions and argu-
ments got going, people sat down to talk, it began to be
like a party at home. Delicate little pastries and bits of
meat and fish were passed around, glasses were constantly
refilled by the attentive waiter. Shevek accepted a dnak.
He had watched Urrasti guzzling alcohol for months now,
and none of them had seemed to fall ill from it. The stuff
tasted like medicine, but somebody explained that it was
mostly carbonated water, which he liked. He was thirsty,
so he drank it right off.

A couple of men were determined to talk physics with
him. One of them was well mannered, and Shevek man-
aged to evade him for a while, for he found it hard to
talk physics with nonphysicists. The other was overbear-
ing, and no escape was possible from him; but irritation,
Shevek found, made it much easier to talk. The man
knew everything, apparently because he had a lot of mon-
ey. "As I see it," he informed Shevek, "your Simultaneity
Theory simply denies the most obvious fact about time,
the fact that time passes."

"Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls
'facts.' It is different from business," Shevek said very
mildly and agreeably, but there was something in his mild-
ness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby,
turn around to listen. "Within the strict terms of Simul-
taneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physical-
ly objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one."

"Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that
means in baby talk," Vea said. Her acuteness made She-
vek grin.

"Well. we think that time 'passes,' flows past us, but
what if it is we who move forward, from past to future,
always discovering the new? It would be a little like read-
ing a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, be-
tween its covers. But if you want to read the story and
understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go
forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very
great book, and we would be very small readers."

"But the fact is," said Dearri, "that we experience the
universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what's the
use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be
all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but
it has no practical application, no relevance to real life.
178

Unless it means we can build a time machinel" he added
with a kind of hard, false joviality.

"But we don't experience the universe only successive-
ly," Shevek said. "Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?"
He was proud of himself for having, for once, remem-
bered to call someone 'Mr.'

"What's that got to do with it?"

"It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience
time at all. A little baby has no time; he can't distance
himself from the past and understand how it relates to
his present, or plan how his present might relate to his
future. He does not know time passes; he does not under-
stand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like
that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all
changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed to-
gether. In myth and legend there is no time. What past
is it the tale means when it says 'Once upon a time'? And
so, when the mystic makes the reconnectiou of his reason
and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being,
and understands the eternal return."

"Yes, the mystics," the shyer man said, eagerly,
'Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote. The un-
conscious mind is coextensive with the universe."

"But we're not babies," Dearri cut in, "we're rational
men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical re-
gressivism?"

There was a pause, while Shevek helped himself to a
pastry which he did not want, and ate it. He had lost his
temper once today and made a fool of himself. Once was
enough.

"Maybe you could see it," he said, "as an effort to
strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully
our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution.
It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It
deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why
things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time—
never of the circle of time."

"The circle?" asked the politer inquisitor, with such
evident yearning to understand that Shevek quite forgot
Dearri, and plunged in with enthusiasm, gesturing with
hands and arms as if trying to show his listener, materially,
the arrows, the cycles, the oscillations he spoke of. 'Time
goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you
179

see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isnt
it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count
the orbits endlessly—an observer can. Indeed such a sys-
tem is how we count time. It constitutes the time-writer,
the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time?
Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atem-
poral process. It must be compared, referred to some
other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal.
Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms,
you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds
are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic
motion relative to one another. In fact. it is the tiny time-
reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough
permanence that evolution is possible. The little timeless-
nesses added together make up time. And then on the big
scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole
universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion
and contraction, without any before or after. Only
within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is
there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two
aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without
which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or
creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without^which
there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world
without clocks or seasons or promises."

"You can't assert two contradictory statements about
the same thing," said Dearri, with the calmness of superior
knowledge. "In other words, one of these "aspects* is real,
the other's simply an illusion."

"Many physicists have said that," Shevek assented.

"But what do you say?" asked the one who wanted to
know.

"Well, I think it's an easy way out of the difficulty. . . .
Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion?
Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without
becoming is a big bore. ... If the mind is able to perceive
time in both these ways, then a true chronosopby should
provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects
or processes of time could be understood."

"But what's the good of this sort of 'understanding,'"
Dearri said, "if it doesn't result in practical, technological
applications? Just word juggling, isn't it"

"You ask questions like a true profiteer," Shevek said,
180

and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the
most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri
nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction.
Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, "I don't
really understand a word you say, you know, but it
seems to me that if I did understand what you said about
the book—that everything really all exists now—then
couldn't we foretell the future? If it's already there?"

"No, no," the shyer man said, not at all shyly. "It's not
there like a couch or a house. Time isn't space. You can't
walk around in it!" Vea nodded brightly, as if quite re-
lieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage
from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher
thought, the shy man turned to Dearri and said, "It seems
to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics.
Would you agree to that. Dr. Shevek?"

"Ethics? Well, I don't know. I do mostly mathematics,
you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behav-
ior."

"Why not?" said Dearri.

Shevek ignored him. "But it's true, chronosophy does
involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our abili-
ty to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby.
again, the animal, they don't see the difference between
what they do now and what will happen because of it.
They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing
the difference between now and not now, we can make
the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibili-
ty. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means
is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will
lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny
the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of
a real future. If time and reason are functions of each
other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better
know it, and try to make the best of it. To act respon-
sibly."

"But look here," said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction
in his own keenness, "you just said that in your Simul-
taneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of
eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the
book that's already written? All you can do is read it
There's no choice, no freedom of action left."

'That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite
181

right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency
thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a
foolish little picture—you are throwing a rock at a tree,
and if you are a Simultanist the rock has alreadyJ^it the
tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So wmch do
you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without
thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things
difficult, and choose both."

"How—how do you reconcile them?" the shy man asked
earnestly.

Shevek nearly laughed in despair. "I don't know. I have
been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does
hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will
explain it. We don't want purity, but complexity, the rela-
tionship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model
of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A
complexity that includes not only duration but creation,
not only being but becoming, not only geometry but
ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to
ask the question. ..."

"All very well, but what industry needs is answers," said
Deani.

Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said
nothing at all.

There was a heavy silence, into which Vea leapt, grace-
ful and inconsequential, returning to her theme of fore-
seeing the future. Others were drawn in by this topic,
and they all began telling their experiences with fortune-
tellers Mid clairvoyants.

Shevek resolved to say nothing more, no matter what he
was asked. He was thirstier than ever; be let the waiter
refill his glass, and drank the pleasant, fizzy stuff. He
looked around the room, trying to dissipate his anger and
tension in watching other people. But they were also be-
having very emotionally, for loti—shouting, laughing loud-
ly, interrupting each other. One pair was indulging in sex-
ual foreplay in a comer. Shevek looked away, disgusted.
Did they egoize even in sex? To caress and copulate in
front of unpaired people was as vulgar as to eat in front
of hungry people. He returned his attention to the group
around him. They were off prediction, now, and onto
politics. They were all disputing about the war, about
182

what Thu would do next, what A-Io would do next, what
the CWG would do next.

"Why do you talk only in abstractions?" he inquired
suddenly, wondering as he spoke why he was speaking,
when he had resolved not to. "It is not names of countries,
it is people killing each other. Why do the soldiers go? Why
does a man go kill strangers?"

"But that's what soldiers are for," said a little fair wom-
an with an opal in her navel. Several men began to ex-
plain the principle of national sovereignty to Shevek.
Vea interrupted, "But let him talk. How would you solve
the mess, Shevek?"

"Solution's in plain sight."

'•Where?"

"Anarres!"

"But what you people do on the Moon doesnt solve our
problems here."

"Man's problem is all the same. Survival. Species, group,
individual."

"National self-defense—" somebody shouted.

They argued, he argued. He knew what he wanted to
say, and knew it must convince everyone because it was
clear and true, but somehow he could not get it said prop-
erly. Everybody shouted. The little fair woman patted the
broad arm of the chair she was sitting in, and be sat
down on it. Her shaven, silken head came peering up
under his arm. "Hello, Moon Man!" she said. Vea had
joined another group for a time, but now was back near
him. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked large
and liquid. He thought he saw Pae across the room, but
there were so many faces that they blurred together.
Things happened in fits and starts, with blanks in between,
as if he were being allowed to witness the operation of the
Cyclic Cosmos of old Gvarab's hypothesis from behind
the scenes. "The principle of legal authority must be up-
held, or we'll degenerate into mere anarchy'" thundered
a fat, frowning man. Shevek said, "Yes, yes, degenerate!
We have enjoyed it for one hundred and fifty years now."
The little fair woman's toes, in silver sandals, peeped out
from under her skirt, which was sewn all over with
hundreds and hundreds of tiny pearls. Vea said, "But tell
us about Anarres—what's it really like? Is it so wonderful
there really?"

183

He was sitting on the arm of the chair, and Vea was
curled up on the hassock at his knees, erect and supple,
her soft breasts staring at him with their blind eyes, her
face smiling, complacent, flushed.               ^

Something dark turned over in Shevek's mind, darken-
ing everything. His mouth was dry. He finished the glass-
ful the waiter had just poured him. "I don't know," he
said; his tongue felt half paralyzed. "No. It is not wonder-
fuL It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all
dust and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people
aren't beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me
and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very
dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that.
The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No
palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can't always have
what you want, or even what you need, because there isn't
enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough
rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, ma-
chines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We
are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything
is beautiful, here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing
is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the
men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but
each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes.
And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the
human spirit Because our men and women are free—
possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors
are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with
a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison.
It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the walll"

They were all looking at him.

He heard the loudness of his voice still ringing in the
silence, felt his ears burning. The darkness, the blankness,
turned over once more in his mind. "I feel dizzy," he said,
and stood up.

Vea was at his arm. "Come along this way," she said,
laughing a little and breathless. He followed her as she
threaded her way through the people. He now felt his face
was very pale, and the dizziness did not pass; he hoped she
was taking him to the washroom, or to a window where
he could breathe fresh air. But the room they came into
was large and dimly lit by reflection. A high, white bed
bulked against the wall; a looking-glass covered half an-
184

other wall. There was a close, sweet fragrance of draper-
ies, linens, the perfume Vea used.

''You are too much," Vea said. bringing herself directly
before him and looking up into his face, in the dimness,
with that breathless laugh. "Really too much—you are
impossible—magnificent!" She put her hands on his shoul-
ders. "Oh, the looks on their faces! I've got to kiss you for
that!" And she lifted herself on tiptoe, presenting him her
mouth, and her white throat, and her naked breasts.

He took hold of her and kissed her mouth, forcing her
head backward, and then her throat and breasts. She
yielded at first as if she had no bones, then she writhed a
little, laughing and pushing weakly at him, and began to
talk. "Oh, no, no, now behave," she said. *'NoWt come on,
we do have to go back to the party. No, Saevek, now calm
down, this won't do at all!" He paid no attention. He
pulled her with him toward the bed, and she came, though
she kept talking. He fumbled with one hand at the compli-
cated clothes he was wearing and managed to get his
trousers unfastened. Then there was Vea's clothing, the
lowslung but tight-fitted skirt band, which he could not
loosen. "Now, stop,'* she said. "No, now listen, Shevek, it
won't do, not now. I haven't taken a contraceptive, if
I got stuffed I'd be in a pretty mess, my husband's coming
back in two weeksl No, let me be," but he could not let
her be; his face was pressed against her soft, sweaty,
scented flesh. "Listen, don't mess up my clothes, people will
notice, for heaven's sake. Wait—just wait, we can arrange
it, we can fix up a place to meet, I do have to be careful
of my reputation, I can't trust the maid. Just wait, not
now—Not nowl Not now!" Frightened at last by his
blind urgency, his force, she pushed at him as hard
as she could, her hands against his chest He took a step
backward, confused by her sudden high tone of fear and
her struggle; but he could not stop, her resistance excited
him further. He gripped her to him, and his semen spurted
out against the white silk of her dress.

"Let me gol Let me gol" she was repeating in the
!same high whisper. He let her go. He stood dazed. He
fumbled at his trousers, trying to dose them. "I am—
sorry—I thought you wanted—"

"For God's sakel" Vea said, looking down at her
185

skirt in the dim light, twitching the pleats away from her.
*'Really! Now 111 have to change my dress.'*

Shevek stood, his mouth open, breathing with difficulty,
his hands hanging; then all at once be turned and blundered
out of the dim room. Back in the bright room of the party
he stumbled through the crowded people, tripped over a
leg, found his way blocked by bodies, clothes, jewels,
breasts, eyes, candle flames, furniture. He ran up against a
table. On it lay a silver platter on which tiny pastries
stuffed with meat, cream, and herbs were arranged in
concentric circles like a huge pale flower. Shevek gasped
for breath, doubled up, and vomited all over the platter.

*TU take him home," Pae said.

"Do, for heaven's sake," said Vea. *'Were you looking
for him, Saio?"

"Oh, a bit. Fortunately Demaere called you."

^ou are certainly welcome to him."

"He won't be any trouble. Passed out in the halL May I
use your phone before I go?"

"Give my love to the Chief," Vea said archly.

Oiie had come to his sister's fiat with Pae, and left
with him. They sat in the middle seat of the big Govern-
ment limousine that Pae always had on call, the same one
that had brought Shevek from the space port last sum-
mer. He now lay as they had dumped him on the back
seat.

"Was he with your sister all day, Demaere?"

"Since noon, apparently."

Thank Godi"

"Why are you so worried about his getting into the
slums? Any Odonian's already convinced we're a lot of
oppressed wage slaves, what's the difference if he sees a bit
of corroboration?"

"I don't care what he sees. We dont want him seen.
Have you been reading the birdseed papers? Or the broad-
sheets that were circulating last week in Old Town, about
the 'Forerunner'? The myth—the one who comes before
the millennium—*a stranger, an outcast, an exile, bearing
in empty hands the time to come.' They quoted that. The
rabble are in one of their damned apocalyptic moods.
Looking for a figurehead. A catalyst. Talking about a gen-
eral strike. They'll never learn. They need a lesson all the
186

aame. Damned rebellious cattle, send them to fight Thu.
it's the only good we'll ever get from them."

Neither man spoke again during the ride.

The night watchman of the Senior Faculty House helped
them get Shevek up to his room. They loaded him onto the
bed. He began to snore at once.

Oiie stayed to take off Shevek's shoes and put a blanket
over him. The drunken man's breath was foul; Oiie stepped
away from the bed, the fear and the love he felt for
Shevek rising up in him, each strangling the other. He
Sscowled, and muttered, "Dirty fool." He snapped the
light off and returned to the other room. Pae was standing
at the desk going through Shevek's papers.

"Leave off," Oiie said, his expression of disgust deepen-
ing. "Come on. It's two in the morning. I'm tired."

"What has the bastard been doing, Demaere? Still noth-
ing here, absolutely nothing. Is he a complete fraud? Have
•we been taken in by a damned mdve peasant from Utopia?
Where's his theory? Where's our instantaneous spaceflight?
Where's our advantage over the Hainish? Nine, ten months
we've been feeding the bastard, for nothing!" Nevertheless
he pocketed one of the papers before he followed Oiie to
the door.

187

Chapter 8

^iKKRfi^




They were out on the athletic fields of Abbenay*s North
Park, six of them, in the long gold and heat and dust of
the evening. They were all pleasantly replete, for dinner
had gone on most of the afternoon, a street festival and
feast with cooking over open fires. It was the midsummer
holiday. Insurrection Day, commemorating the first great
uprising in Nio Bsseia in the Urrasti year 740, nearly two
hundred years ago. Cooks and refectory workers were
honored as the guests of the rest of the community on that
day, because a syndicate of cooks and waiters had begun
the strike that led to the insurrection. There were many
such traditions and festivals on Anarres, some instituted by
the Settlers and others, like the harvest homes and the
Feast of the Solstice, that had risen spontaneously out of
the rhythms of life on the planet and the need of those
who work; together to celebrate together.

They were talking, all rather desultorily except for Tak-
ver. She had danced for hours, eaten quantities of fried
bread and pickles, and was feeling very lively. •'Why did
Kvigot get posted to the Keran Sea fisheries, where he'll
have to start all over again, while Turib takes on his re-
search program here?" she was saying. Her research syndi-
cate had been assimilated into a project managed directly
188

by PDC, and she had become a strong partisan of some of
Bedap's ideas. "Because Kvigot is a good biologist who
doesnt agree with Simas's fuddy-duddy theories, and Turib
is a nothing who scrubs Simas's back in the baths. See
who takes over directing the program when Simas retires. s
She will, Turib will, Fll bet you!"

"What does that expression mean?" asked somebody
who felt indisposed for social criticism.

Bedap, who had been putting on weight at the waist
and was serious about exercise, was trotting earnestly
around the playing field. The others were sitting on a dusty
bank under trees, getting their exercise verbally.

"It's an lotic verb," Shevek said. "A game the Urrasti
play with probabilities. The one who guesses right gets
the other one's property." He had long ago ceased to ob-
serve -Sabul's ban on mentioning his lotic studies.

"How did one of their words get into Pravic?"

"The Settlers," said another. "They had to leam Pravic
as adults; they must have thought in the old languages for
a long time. I read somewhere that the word damn isn't in
the Pravic Dictionary—it's lotic too. Farigv didnt provide
any swearwords when he invented the language, or if
be did his computers didnt understand the necessity."

"What's hell, then?" Takver asked. *T used to think it
meant the shit depot in the town where I grew up. *Go to
hell!' The worst place to go."

Desar, the mathematician, who had now taken a per-
manent posting to the Institute staff, and who still hung
around Shevek, though he seldom spoke to Takver, said in
his cryptographic style, "Means Urras."

"On Unas, it means the place you go to when you're
damned."

'That's a posting to Southwest in summer," said Terms,
an ecologist, an old friend of Takver's.

"It's in the religious mode, in lotic."

"I know you have to read lotic, Shev, but do you have
to read religion?"

"Some of the old Urrasti physics is all in the religious
mode. Concepts like that come up. 'Hell' means the place
of absolute evil."

"The manure depot in Round Valley," Takver said. "I
thought so."

Bedap came pumping up, dust-whitened, sweat"

189

streaked. He sat down heavily beside Shevek and panted^

"Say something in lotic," asked Richat, a student of
Shevek's. •'What does it sound like?"              ^

"You know: Hell! Damn!"

"But stop swearing at me," said the girl, giggling, and

say a whole sentence."

Shevek good-naturedly said a sentence in lotic. "I don't
really know how it's pronounced," he added, "I just
guess."

"What did it mean?"

"// the passage of time ts a feature of human con-
sciousness, past and future are functions of the mind.
From a pre-Sequentist, Keremcho."

"How weird to think of people speaking and you
couldn't understand them!"

"They can't even understand each other. They speak
hundreds of different languages, all the crazy archists on
the Moon...."

"Water, water," said Bedap, still panting.

"There is no water," said Terrus. "It hasnt rained for
eighteen decads. A hundred and eighty-three days to be
precise. Longest drought in Abbenay for forty years."

"If it goes on, well have to recycle urine, the way they
did in the Year 20. Glass of piss, Shev?"

"Dont joke," said Terrus. "That's the thread we walk
on. Will it rain enough? The leaf crops in Southrising are a
dead loss already. No rain there for thirty decads."

They all looked up into the hazy, golden sky. The ser-
rated leaves of the trees under which they sat, tall exotica
from the Old World, drooped on their branches, dusty,
curled by the dryness.

"Never be another Great Drought," Desar said,
"Modem desalinization plants. Prevent."

"They might help alleviate it," Terrus said.

Winter that year came early, cold, and dry in the
Northern Hemisphere. Frozen dust on the wind in the low,
wide streets of Abbenay. Water to the baths strictly ra-
tioned: thirst and hunger outranked cleanliness. Food and
clothing for the twenty million people of Anarres came
from the holum plants, leaf, seed, fiber, root. There was
some stockpile of textiles in the warehouses and depots, but
there had never been much reserve of food. Water went to
190

the land, to keep the plants alive. The sky over the city was
cloudless and would have been clear, but it was yellowed
with dust windbome from drier lands to the south and
west Sometimes when the wind blew down from the
north, from the Ne Theras, the yellow haze cleared and
left a brilliant, empty sky, dark blue hardening to purple
at the zenith.

Takver was pregnant Mostly she was sleepy and be-
nign. "I am a fish," she said, "a fish in water. I am inside
the baby inside me." But at times she was overtaxed by her
work, or left hungry by the slightly decreased meals at
commons. Pregnant women, like children and old people,
could get a light extra meal daily, lunch at eleven, but she
often missed this because of the exacting schedule of her
work. She could miss a meal, but the fish in her labora-
tory tanks could not. Friends often brought by some-
thing saved out from their dinner or left over at their
commons, a filled bun or a piece of fruit. She ate all
gratefully but continued to crave sweets, and sweets were
in short supply. When she was tired she was anxious and
easily upset, and her temper flared at a word.

Late in the autumn Shevek completed the manuscript
of the Principles of Simultaneity. He gave it to Sabul for
approval for the press. Sabul kept it for a decad, two
decads, three decads, and said nothing about it. Shevek
asked him about it. He replied that he had not yet got
around to reading it, he was too busy. Shevek waited. It
was midwinter. The dry wind blew day after day; the
ground was frozen. Everything seemed to have come
to a halt. an uneasy halt, waiting for rain, for birth.

The room was dark. The lights had just come on in the
city; they looked weak under the high, dark-grey sky.
Takver came in, lit the lamp, crouched down in her over-
coat by the heat grating. "Oh it's cold! Awful. My feet
feel like Fve been walking on glaciers, I nearly cried on
the way home they hurt so. Rotten profiteering boots' Why
can't we make a decent pair of boots? What are you
sitting in the dark for?"

"I don't know."

"Did you go to commons? I got a bite at Surplus on the
way home. I had to stay, the kukuri eggs were hatching
and we had to get the fry out of the tanks before the
adults ate them. Did you eat?"
191

"No."

"Don't be sulky. Please don't be sulky tonight If one
more thing goes wrong, I'll cry. I'm sick of crying alWhe
time. Damned stupid hormones! I wish I could have babies
like the fish, lay the eggs and swim off and that's the end
of it. Unless I swam back and ate them. .. . Don't sit and
look like a statue like that. I just can't stand it.'* She was
slightly in tears, as she crouched by the breath of heat
from the grating, trying to unfasten her boots with stiff
fingers.

Shevek said nothing.

"What is it? You can't just sit there!"

"Sabul called me in today. He won't recommend the
Principles for publication, or export."

Takver stopped struggling with the bootlace and sat
still. She looked at Shevek over her shoulder. At last she
said, "What did he say exactly?"

"The critique he wrote is on the table."

She got up, shuffled over to the table wearing one boot,
and read the paper, leaning over the table, her hands in
her coat pockets.

" That Sequency Physics is the highroad of chronpsoph-
ical thought in the Odonian Society has been a mutually
agreed principle since the Settlement of Anarres. Egoistic
divagation from this solidarity of principle can result only
in sterile spinning of impractical hypotheses without social
organic utility, or repetition of the superstitious-religious
speculations of the irresponsible hired scientists of the
Profit States of Urras. . . .* Oh, the profiteer! The petty-
minded, envious little Odo-spouter! Will he send this
critique to the Press?"

"He's done so."

She knelt to wrestle off her boots. She glanced up
several times at Shevek, but she did not go to him or try
to touch him, and for some while she did not say any-
thing. When she spoke her voice was not loud and
strained as before, but had its natural husky, furry quality.
"What will you do, Shev?"

"There's nothing to do."

*'We'll print the book. Form a printing syndicate, leam
to set type, and do it."

"Paper's at minimum ration. No nonessential printing.
192

Only PDC publications, tffl the tree-holum plantations are
safe."

"Then can you change the presentation somehow? Dis-
guise what you say. Decorate it with Sequency trimmings.
So that hell accept it."

"You can't disguise black as white."

She did not ask if he could bypass Sabul or go over
his head- Nobody on Anarres was supposed to be over
anybody's head. There were no bypasses. If you could
not work in solidarity with your syndics, you worked
alone.

"What if ..." She stopped. She got up and put her boots
by the heater to dry. She took off her coat, hung it up,
and put a heavy hand-loomed shawl over her shoulders.
She sat down on the bed platform, grunting a little as she
lowered herself the last few inches. She looked up at
Shevek, who sat in profile between her and the windows.

"What if you offered to let him sign as co-author? Like
the first paper you wrote.'*

"Sabul won't put his name to 'superstitious-religious
speculations.*"

"Are you sure? Are you sure that isn't Just what he
wants? He knows what this is, what you've done. You've
always said he's shrewd. He knows it'll put him and the
whole Sequency school in the recycle bin. But if he could
share with you, share the credit? All he is, is ego. If he
could say that it was his book . .."

Shevek said bitterly, "I'd as soon share you with him
as that book."

"Don't look at it that way, Shev. Ifs the book that's
important—the ideas. Listen. We want to keep this child
to be bom with us as a baby, we want to love it. But if for
some reason it would die if we kept it, it could only live
in a nursery, if we never could set eyes on it or know its
name—if we had that choice, which would we choose? To
keep the stillborn? Or to give life?"

"I don't know," he said. He put his head in his hands,
rubbing his forehead painfully. "Yes, of course. Yes. But
this—But I—"

"Brother, dear heart," Takver said. She clenched her
hands together on her lap, but she did not reach out to
him. "It doesn't matter what name is on the book. People
will know. The truth is the book."

193

"I am that book,** he said. Then he shut his eyes, and
sat motionless. Takver went to him then, timidly, touching
him as gently as if she touched a wound.

Early in the year 164 the first, incomplete, drastica^r
edited version of the Principles of Simultaneity was printed
in Abbenay, with Sabul and Shevek as joint authors. PDC
was printing only essential records and directives, but
Sabul had influence at the Press and in the Information
division of PDC, and had persuaded them of the propa-
ganda value of the book abroad. Urras, he said, was
rejoicing over the drought and possible famine on Anarres;

the last shipment of loti journals was full of gloating
prophecies of the imminent collapse of the Odonian
economy. What better denial, said Sabul, than the publi-
cation of a major work of pure thought, "a monument of
science," he said in his revised critique, "soaring above
material adversity to prove the unquenchable vitality of the
Odonian Society and its triumph over archist propertarian-
ism in every area of human thought."

So the work was printed; and fifteen of the three
hundred copies went aboard the loti freighter Mindful.
Shevek never opened a copy of the printed book. In the
export packet, however, he put a copy of the original,
complete manuscript, handwritten. A note on the cover
asked that it be given to Dr. Atro of the College of the
Noble Science of leu Eun University, with the compliments.
of the author. It was certain that Sabul, who gave
final approval to the packet, would notice the addition.
Whether he took the manuscript out or left it in, Shevefc
did not know. He might confiscate it out of spite; he might
let it go, knowing that his emasculated abridgment would
not have the desired effect on Urrasti physicists. He said
nothing about the manuscript to Shevek. Shevek did not
ask about it.

Shevek said very little to anyone, (hat spring. He took
on a volunteer posting, construction work on a new water-
recycling plant in South Abbenay, and was away at that
work or teaching most of the day. He returned to his
studies in subatomics, often spending evenings at the
Institute's accelerator or the laboratories with the particle
specialists. With Takver and their friends he was quiet,
sober, gentle, and cold.

Takver got very big in the beUy and walked like a
194

person carrying a large, heavy basket of laundry. She
stayed at work at the fish labs till she had found and
trained an adequate replacement for herself, then sha
came home and began labor, more than a decad past her
time. Shevek arrived home in midaftemoon. "You might
go fetch the midwife," Takver said. 'Tell her the con-
tractions are four or five minutes apart, but they're not
speeding up much, so don't hurry very much."

He hurried, and when the midwife was out, he gave
way to panic. Both the midwife and the block medic were
out, and neither had left a note on the door saying
where they could be found, as they usually did Shevek's
heart began pounding in his chest, and he saw things sud-
denly with a dreadful clarity. He saw that this absence of
help was an evil omen. He had withdrawn from Takver
since the winter, since the decision about the book. She had
been increasingly quiet, passive, patient. He understood
that passivity now: it was a preparation for her deaths
It was she who had withdrawn from him, and he had not
tried to follow her. He had looked only at his own bitter-
ness of heart, and never at her fear, or courage. He had
let her alone because he wanted to be let alone, and so she
had gone on, gone far, too far, would go on alone, forever.

He ran to the block clinic, arriving so out of breath
and unsteady on his legs that they thought he was having a:

heart attack. He explained. They sent a message off to
another midwife and told him to go home, the partner
would be wanting company. He went home, and at every
stride the panic in him grew, the terror, the certainty of
loss.

But once there he could not kneel by Takver and asfc
her forgiveness, as he wanted desperately to do. Takver
had no time for emotional scenes; she was busy. She had
cleared the bed platform except for a clean sheet, and
she was at work bearing a child. She did not howl or"
scream, as she was not in pain, but when each contraction!
came she managed it by muscle and breath control, and
then let out a great fwuff of breath, like one who makes a
terrific effort to lift a heavy weight. Shevek had never"
seen any work that so used all the strength of the body.

He could not look on such work without trying to help
in it. He could serve as handhold and brace when she
needed leverage. They found this arrangement very quickly
195

by trial and error, and kept to it after the midwife had
come in. Takver gave birth afoot, squatting, her faco
against Shevek's thigh, her hands gripping his braced
arms. "There you are," the midwife said quietly under ttfc
hard, engine-like pounding of Takver's breathing, and she
took the slimy but recognizably human creature that had
appeared. A gush of blood followed, and an amorphous;

mass of something not human, not alive. The terror he had
forgotten came back into Shevek redoubled. It was death
he saw. Takver had let go his arms and was huddled down
quite limp at his feet He bent over her, stiff with horror
and grief.

"That's it," said the midwife, "help her move aside so
I can clean this up."

"I want to wash," Takver said feebly.

"Here, help her wash up. Those are sterile cloths—'
there."

"Waw, waw, waw," said another voice.

The room seemed to be full of people.

"Now then," the midwife said. "Here, get that baby
back with her, at the breast, to help shut off the bloodflpw.
I want to get this placenta to the freezer in the clinic.
Ill be ten minutes."

"Where is—Where is the—"

"In the crib!" said the midwife, leaving. Shevek located
the very small bed, which had been standing ready in the
corner for four decads, and the infant in it. Somehow
in this extreme rush of events the midwife had found time
to clean the infant and even put a gown on it, so that it
was not so fishlike and slippery as when he had seen it
first. The afternoon had got dark, with the same peculiar
rapidity and lack of time lapse. The lamp was on. Shevek
picked up the baby to take it to Takver. Its face was
incredibly small, with large, fragile-looking, closed eyelids.
*'Give it here," Takver was saying. "Oh, do hurry up,
please give it to me."

He brought it across the room and very cautiously
lowered it onto Takver's stomach. "Ah!" she said softly,
a call of pure triumph.

"What is it?" she asked after a while, sleepily.

Shevek was sitting beside her on the edge of the bed
platform. He carefully investigated, somewhat taken aback
196

by the length of gown as contrasted with the extreme
shortness of limb. "Girl."

The midwife came back, went around putting things to
rights. "You did a first-rate job," she remarked, to both of
them. They assented mildly. "Ill look in in the rooming,"
she said leaving. The baby and Takver were already
asleep. Shevek put his head down near Takver's. He was
accustomed to the pleasant musky smell of her skin. This
had changed; it had become a perfume, heavy and faint,
heavy with sleep. Very gently he put one arm over her as
she lay on her side with the baby against her breast In the
room heavy with life he slept.

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might
undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a
soap works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted
federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked,
and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an
institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of
private conscience.

This was fully in accord with Odonian social theory. The
validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term,
was deep in the grain of Odo's thinking; though it might
seem that her insistence on freedom to change would
invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom
made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction
taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no
direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will
occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be
unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own
building, a maze in which no one way is better than any
other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the
idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.

Many people felt that this idea of fidelity was misapplied
to sexual life. Odo's femininity swayed her, they said,
towards a refusal of real sexual freedom; here, if nowhere
else, Odo did not write for men. As many women as men
made this criticism, so it would appear that it was not
masculinity that Odo failed to understand, but a whole
type of section of humanity, people to whom experiment is
the soul of sexual pleasure.

Though she may not have understood them, and prob-
ably considered them propertarian aberrations from the

197

norm—the human species being, if not a pair-bonding
species, yet a time-binding one—still she provided better for
the promiscuous than for those who tried long-term
partnership. No law, no limit, no penalty, no punishment*
no disapproval applied to any sexual practice of any
kind, except the rape of a child or woman, for which the
rapist's neighbors were likely to provide summary revenge
if he did not get promptly into the gentler hands of a
therapy center. But molestation was extremely rare in a
society where complete fulfillment was the norm from
puberty on, and the only social limit imposed on sexual
activity was the mild one of pressure in favor of privacy,
a kind of modesty imposed by the communality of life.

On the other hand, those who undertook to form and
keep a partnership, whether homosexual or heterosexual,
met with problems unknown to those content with sex
wherever they found it They must face not only jealousy
and possessiveness and the other diseases of passion for
which monogamous union provides such a fine medium of
growth, but also the external pressures of social organiza-
tion. A couple that undertook partnership did so knowing
that they might be separated at any time by the exigencies
of labor distribution.

Divlab, the administration of the division of labor, tried
to keep couples together, and to reunite them as soon as
possible on request; but it could not always be done,
especially in urgent levies, nor did anyone expect Divlab
to remake whole lists and reprogram computers trying to
do it. To survive, to make a go of life, an Anarresti knew
he had to be ready to go where he was needed and do the
work that needed doing. He grew up knowing labor distri-
bution as a major factor of life, an immediate, permanent
social necessity; whereas conjugality was a personal
matter, a choice that could be made only within the
larger choice.

But when a direction is chosen freely and followed
whole-heartedly, it may seem that all things further the
going. So the possibility and actuality of separation often
served to strengthen the loyalty of partners. To maintain
genuine spontaneous fidelity in a society that had no legal
or moral sanctions against infidelity, and to maintain it
during voluntarily accepted separations that could come at
any time and might last years, was something of a chal-
198

lenge. But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks
freedom in adversity.

In the year 164 many people who had never sought it
got a taste of that kind of freedom, and liked it, liked the
sense of test and danger. The drought that began in the
summer of 163 met no relief in winter. By the summer
of 164 there was hardship, and the threat of disaster if the
drought went on.

Rationing was strict; labor drafts were imperative. The
struggle to grow enough food and to get the food dis-
tributed became convulsive, desperate. Yet people were
not desperate at alL Odo wrote: "A child free from
the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic com-
petition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing
and the capacity for Joy in doing it. It is useless work that
darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother,
of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook,
of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and
doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest
source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."
There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in
Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at
work however hard the work, a readiness to drop all care
as soon as what could be done had been done. The old
tag of "solidarity" had come alive again. There is
exhilaration in finding that the bond is stronger, after
all, than all that tries the bond.

Early in the summer PDC put up posters suggesting that
people shorten their working day by an hour or so, since
the protein issue at commons was now insufficient for full
normal expense of energy. The exuberant activity of the
city streets had already been slowing down. People off
work early loitered in the squares, played bowls in the dry
parks, sat in workshop doorways and struck up conversa-
tion with passersby. The population of the city was visibly
thinned, as several thousands had volunteered or been
posted to emergency farm work. But mutual trust allayed
depression or anxiety. "Well see each other through,"
they said, serenely. And great impulses of vitality ran just
under the surface. When the wells in the northern
suburbs failed, temporary mains from other districts
were laid by volunteers working in their free time, skilled
199

and unskilled, adults and adolescents, and the job was
done in thirty hours.

Late in summer Shevek was posted to an emergency
farm draft to Red Springs community in Southrising. Ofc
the promise of some rain that had fallen in the equatoriaT
storm season, they were trying to get a crop of grain
holum planted and reaped before the drought returned.

He had been expecting an emergency posting, since his
construction Job was finished and he had listed himself as
available in the general labor pooL All summer he had
done nothing but teach his courses, read, go out on what-
ever volunteer calls came up in their block and in the city,
and come home to Takver and the baby. Takver had gone
back to her laboratory, mornings only, after five decads.
As a nursing mother she was entitled to both protein and
carbohydrate supplements at meals, and she always
availed herself of both; their friends could not share extra
food with her any more, there was no extra food. She
was thin but flourishing, and the baby was small but solid.

Shevek got a great deal of pleasure from the baby.
Having sole charge of her in the mornings (they left her in
the nursery only while be taught or did volunteer work).
he felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden
and reward of parenthood. An alert, responsive baby, she
gave Shevek the perfect audience for his suppressed verbal
fantasies, what Takver called his crazy streak. He would
sit the baby on his knees and address wild cosmological
lectures to her, explaining how time was actually space
turned inside out, the chronon being thus the everted
viscera of the quantum, and distance one of the accidental
properties of light. He gave extravagant and ever-changing
nicknames to the baby, and recited ridiculous mnemonics
at her: Time is a manacle. Time is tyrannical, Super-
mechanical, Superorganical—TOPI—and at the pop, the
baby arose a short distance into the air, squeaking and
waving her fat fists. Both received great satisfaction from
these exercises. When he received his posting it was a
wrench. He had hoped for something close to Abbenay,
not clear around in Southrising. But along with the un-
pleasant necessity of leaving Takver and the baby for
sixty days came the steady assurance of coming back to
them. So long as be had that, he had no complaints.

The night before he left, Bedap came and ate at tho
200

Institute refectory with them, and they came back together
to the room. They sat talking in the hot night, the lamp
unlit, the windows open. Bedap, who ate at a small com-
mons where special arrangements were not a burden for
the cooks to handle, had saved up his special-beverages
ration for a decad and taken it all in the form of a liter
bottle of fruit juice. He produced it with pride: a going-
away party. They doled it around and savored it
luxuriously, curling their tongues. "Do you remember,"
Takver said, "all the food, the night before you left
Northsetting? I ate nine of those fried cakes."

"You wore your hair cut short then," Shevek said,
startled by the recollection, which he had never before
paired up to Takver. "That was you, wasn't it?"

"Who did you think it was?"

"By damn, what a kid you were theni"

'*So were you, it's ten years now. I cut my hair so Fd
look different and interesting. A lot of good it did!" She
laughed her loud, cheerful laugh, quickly strangling it so
as not to wake the baby, asleep in her crib behind the
screen. Nothing, however, woke the baby once she had
got to deep. "I used to want so badly to be different. I
wonder why?**

'There's a point, around age twenty," Bedap said, 'Svhen
you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the
rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiari-
ties."

"Or at least accept them with resignation," said Shevek.

"Shev is on a resignation binge," Takver said. "It's old
age coming on. It must be terrible to be thirty."

"Don't worry, you won't be resigned at ninety," Bedap
said, patting her back. "Are you even resigned to your
child's name yet?"

The five- and six-letter names issued by the central
registry computer, being unique to each living individual,
took the place of the numbers which a computer-using
society must otherwise attach to its members. An Anar-
resti needed no identification but his name. The name*
therefore, was felt to be an important part of the self.
though one no more chose it than one's nose or height.
Takver disliked the name the baby had got. Sadik. "It
still sounds like a mouthful of gravel," she said, "it doesn't
fit her"

201

**I like it," Shevek said. *^t sounds like a taB, slender
girl with long black hair."

"But it is a short, fat girl with invisible hair," Bedap
observed.                                               •

"Give her time, brother! Listen. Fm going to make a
speech."

"Speechi Speech!"

"Shh—"

'•Why shh? That baby would sleep through a cataclysm."

"Be quiet. I feel emotional." Shevek raised his cup of
fruit juice. "I want to say—What I want to say is this.
I'm glad Sadik was bom now. In a hard year, in a hard
time, when we need our brotherhood. I'm glad she was
born now, and here. I'm glad she's one of us, an Odonian,
our daughter and our sister. Fm glad she's sister to Bedap.
That she's sister to Sabul, even to Sabul! I drink to this
hope: that as long as she lives, Sadik will love her sisters:

and brothers as well, as joyfully, as I do now tonight. And
that the rain will falL ..."

PDC, the principal users of radio, telephone, and mails,
coordinated the means of long-distance communication,
just as they did the means of long-distance travel and
shipping. There being no ''business" on Anarres, in the
sense of promoting, advertising, investing, speculating, and
so forth, the mail consisted mostly of correspondence
among industrial and professional syndicates, their direc-
tives and newsletters plus those of the PDC, and a small
volume of personal letters. Living in a society where any-
one could move whenever and wherever he wanted, an
Anarresti tended to look for his friends where he was, not
where he had been. Telephones were seldom used within
a community; communities weren't all that big. Even
Abbenay kept up the close regional pattern in its "blocks,'*
the semiautonomous neighborhoods in which you could get
to anyone or anything you needed, on foot. Telephone
calls thus were mostly long-distance, and were handled by
the PDC: personal calls had to be arranged beforehand
by mail, or were not conversations but simply messages
left at the PDC center. Letters went unsealed, not by law,
of course, but by convention. Personal communication at
long distance is costly in materials and labor, and since the
private and the public economy was the same, there was
202

considerable feeling against unnecessary writing or calling.
It was a trivial habit; it smacked of privatism, of egoizing.
This was probably why the letters went unsealed: you
had no right to ask people to carry a message that they
couldnt read. A letter went on a PDC mail dirigible if you
were lucky, and on a produce train if you weren't. Even-
tually it got to the mail depot in the town addressed, and
there it lay, there being no postmen, until somebody told
the addressee that he had a letter and he came to get it

The individual, however, decided what was and what
was not necessary. Shevek and Takver wrote each other
regularly, about once a decad. He wrote;

The trip was not bad, three days, a passenger track
truck clear through. This is a big levy—three thou-
sand people, they say. The effects of the drought
are muck worse here. Not the shortages. The food
in commons is the same ration as in Abbenay,
only here you get boiled gara-greens at both meals
every day because they have a local surplus. We too
begin to feel we have had a surplus. But it is the
climate here that makes misery. This is the Dust. The
air is dry and the wind always blowing. There are
brief rains, but within an hour after rain the ground
loosens and the dusts begins to rise. It has rained
less than half the annual average this season here.
Everyone on the Project gets cracked lips, nose-
bleed, eye irritations, and coughs. Among the people
who live in Red Springs there is a lot of the dust
cough. Babies have a specially hard time, you see
many with skin and eyes inflamed. I wonder if I
would have noticed that half a year ago. One becomes
keener with parenthood. The work is just work and
everyone is comradely, but the dry wind wears.
Last night I thought of the Ne Theras and in the night
the sound of the wind was like the sound of the
stream. I will not regret this separation. It has al-
lowed me to see that I had begun to give less, as if
1 possessed you and you me and there was nothing
more to be done. The real fact has nothing to do
with ownership. What we do is assert the wholeness
of Time. Tell me what Sadik does. I am teaching
a class on the free days to some people who asked
203

for it, one giri is & natural mathematician whom I
shall recommend to the Institute. Your brother,,

Takver wrote to him:                           ^

I am worried by a rather queer thing. The lectures
for 3d Quarter were posted three days ago and I
went to find out what schedule you would have at the
Inst. but no class or room was listed for you. I
thought they had left you off by mistake so went to
the Members Synd. and they said yes they wanted
you to give the Geom. class. So I went to the Inst
Coord. office that old woman with the nose and she
knew nothing, no no I don*t know anything, go to
Central Postingi That is nonsense I said and went to
Sabul. But he was not in the Phys. offices and I have
not seen him yet though I have been back twice.
With Sadik who wears a wonderful white hat Terrus
knitted her out of unraveled yam and looks tremen-
dously fetching. I refuse to go hunt out Sabul
in the room or worm-tunnel or wherever he lives.
Maybe he is off doing volunteer work ha! ha! Perhapsl
you should telephone the Institute and find out
what sort of mistake they have made? In fact I did go
down and check at Divlab Central Posting but there
wasn't any new listing for you. People there were all
right but that old woman with the nose is inefficient
and not helpful, and nobody takes an interest. Bedap
is right we have let bureaucracy creep up on us.
Please come back (with mathematical genius girl if
necessary), separation is educational all right but your
presence is the education I want I am getting a half
liter fruit Juice plus calcium allotment a day because
my milk was running short and S. yelled a lot
Good old doctors!! All. always, T.

Shevek never got this letter. He had left Southrising
before it got to the mail depot in Red Springs.

It was about twenty-five hundred miles from Red Springs
to Abbenay. An individual on the move would have simply
hitchhiked, all transport vehicles being available as pas-
Senger vehicles for as many people as they would hold;

but since four hundred and fifty people were being re-
204

distributed to their regular postings in Northwest, a train
was provided for them. It was made up of passenger cars,
or at least of cars being used at the moment for passengers.
The least popular was the boxcar that had recently carried
a shipment of smoked fish.

After a year of the drought the normal transport Unes
were insufficient, despite the fierce efforts of the transport
workers to meet demands. They were the largest federative
in the Odonian sodety: self-organized, of course, in
regional syndicates coordinated by representatives who
met and worked with the local and central PDC. The net-
work maintained by the transport federative was effective
in normal times and in limited emergencies; it was
flexible, adaptable to circumstance, and the Syndics of
Transport had great team and professional pride. They
called their engines and dirigibles names like Indomitable,
Endurance, Eat-the-Wind: they had mottoes—We Always
Get There—Nothing Is Too Much!—But now, when whole
regions of the planet were threatened with immediate
famine if food was not brought in from other regions,
and when large emergency drafts of workers must be
shifted, the demands laid on transport were too much.
There were not enough vehicles; there were not enough
people to run them. Everything the federative had on
wings or wheels was pressed into service, and apprentices,
retired workers, volunteers, and emergency draftees were
helping man the trucks, the trains, the ships, the ports,
the yards.

The train Shevek was on went along in short rushes and
long waits, since all provision trains took precedence over
it Then it stopped altogether for twenty hours. An over-
worked or underschooled dispatcher had made an error,
and there had been a wreck up the line.

The little town where the train stopped had no extra
food in its commons or warehouses. It was not a farm
community, but a mill town, manufacturing concrete and
foamstone, built on the fortunate congruence of lime
deposits and a navigable river. There were truck gardens,
but it was a town dependent upon transport for food. If
the four hundred and fifty people on the train ate, the one
hundred and sixty local people would not. Ideally, they
would all share, all half-eat or half-starve together. If
there had been fifty, or even a hundred, people on the
205

train, the community probably wouOTiave spared them
at least a baking of bread. But four hundred and fifty?
If they gave that many anything, they would be wiped out
for days. And would the next provisions train come, after
those days? And how much grain would be on it? They
gave nothing.

The travelers, having had nothing in the way of break-
fast that day, thus fasted for sixty hours. They did not
get a meal until the line had been cleared and their train
had run on a hundred and fifty miles to a station with a
refectory stocked for passengers.

It was Shevek's first experience of hunger. He had
fasted sometimes when he was working because he did not
want to be bothered with eating, but two full meals a day
had always been available: constant as sunrise and sunset.
He had never even thought what it might be like to have
to go without them. Nobody in his society, nobody in the
world, had to go without them.

While he got hungrier, while the train sat hour after
hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry
and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the
reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his
society to come through a famine without losing the
solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when
there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But
when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might
making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most
devoted ally, the averted eye.

The passengers' resentment of the townsfolk got bitter,
but it was less ominous than the behavior of the townsfolk
—the way they hid behind "their" walls with "their"
property, and ignored the train, never looked at it. Shevek
was not the only gloomy passenger; a long conversation
meandered up and down beside the stopped cars, people
dropping in and out of it, arguing and agreeing, all on
the same general theme that his thoughts followed. A raid
on the truck gardens was seriously proposed, and bitterly
debated, and might have been carried out, if the train had
not hooted at last for departure.

But when at last it crawled into the station down the
line, and they got a meal—a half loaf of holum bread and
a bowl of soup—their gloom gave place to elation. By the
time you got to the bottom of the bowl you noticed that
206

the soup was pretty thin, but the first taste of it, the first
taste had been wonderful, worth fasting for. They all
agreed on that. They got back into the train laughing and
joking together. They had seen each other through.

A truck-train convoy picked up the Abbenay pas-
sengers at Equator Hill and brought them the last five
hundred miles. They came into the city late on a windy
night of early autumn. It was getting on for midnight; the
streets were empty. Wind flowed through them like a
turbulent dry river. Over dim street lamps the stars flared
with a bright shaken light. The dry storm of autumn and
passion carried Shevek through the streets, half running,
three miles to the northern quarter, alone in the dark city.
He took the three steps of the porchway in one, ran down
the hall, came to the door, opened it. The room was dark.
Stars bumed in the dark windows. "Takveri" he said, and
heard the silence. Before he turned on the lamp, there in
the dark, in the silence, all at once, he learned what
separation was.

Nothing was gone. There was nothing to be gone. Only
Sadik and Takver were gone. The Occupations of Un-
inhabited Space turned softly, gleaming a little, in the
draft from the open door.

There was a letter on the table. Two letters. One from
Takver. It was brief; she had received an emergency
posting to the Comestible Algae Experimental Develop-
ment Laboratories in Northeast, for an indeterminate
period. She wrote:

I could not in conscience refuse now. I went and
talked to them at Divlab and also read their project
sent in to Ecology at PDC, and it is true they need
me because I have worked exactly on this algae-
cuiate-shrimp-kukuri cycle. I requested at Divlab that
you be posted to Rolny but of course they won't act
on that until you also request it, and if this is not
possible because of work at the Inst. then you won't.
After all if it goes on too long I will tell them get
another geneticist, and come back! Sadik is very
well and can say yite for light. It will not be very
long. All, for life, your sister, Takver. Oh please
come if you can.

207

The other note was scribbled on a tiny bit of paper:

"Shevek: Physics off. on yr return. Sabul."

Shevek roamed around the room. The storm, the
impetus that had hurled him through the streets, was still
in him. It had come up against the wall. He could go no
further, yet he must move. He looked in the closet. Noth-
ing was in it but his winter coat and a shirt which Takver.
who liked fine handwork, had embroidered for him; her
few clothes were gone. The screen was folded back, show-
ing the empty crib. The sleeping platform was not made
up, but the orange blanket covered the rolled-up bedding
neatly. Shevek came up against the table again, read
Takver's letter again. His eyes filled with tears of anger. A
rage of disappointment shook him, a wrath, a foreboding.

No one was to blame. That was the worst of it, Takver
was needed, needed to work against hunger—hers, his,
Sadik's hunger. Society was not against them- It was for
them; with them; it was them.

But he had given up his book, and his love, and his
child. How much can a man be asked to give up?

"Hell!" he said aloud. Pravic was not a good swearing
language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and
blasphemy does not exist. "Oh, hell'" he repeated. He
crumpled up Sabul's grubby little note vindictively, and
then brought his handa down clenched against the edge of
the table, twice, three times, in his passion seeking pain.
But there was nothing. There was nothing to be done and
nowhere to be gone. He was left at last with the bedding
to unroll, with lying down alone and getting to sleep, with
evil dreams and without comfort.

First thing in the morning, Bunub knocked. He met her
at the door and did not stand aside to het her in. She was
their neighbor down the hall, a woman of fifty, a ma-
chinist in the Air Vehicle Engine factory. Takver had
always been entertained by her, but she infuriated Shevek.
For one thing, she wanted their room. She had claimed
it when it first came vacant, she said, but the enmity of
the block housing registrar bad prevented her getting it
Her room did not have the comer window, the object
of her undying envy. It was a double, though, and she
lived alone in it, which, given the housing shortage, was
egoistic of her; but Shevek would never have wasted time
on disapproving her if she had not forced him by making
208

excuses. She explained, explained. She had a partner, a
lifelong partner, "just like you two," simper. Only where
was the partner? Somehow he was always spoken of in the
past tense. Meanwhile the double room was pretty well
justified by the succession of men that passed through
Bunub's door, a different man every night, as if Bunub
were a roaring girl of seventeen. Takver observed the
procession with admiration. Bunub came and told her all
about the men, and complained, complained. Her not
having the comer room was only one among unnumbered
grievances. She had a mind both insidious and invidious,
which could find the bad in anything and take it straight
to her bosom. The factory where she worked was a
poisonous mass of incompetence, favoritism, and sabotage.
Meetings of her syndicate were bedlams of unrighteous
innuendo all directed at her. The entire social organism
was dedicated to the persecution of Bunub. All this made
Takver laugh, sometimes wildly, right in Bunub's face.
"Oh, Bunub, you are so funny!" she would gasp and the
woman, with greying hair and a thin mouth and down-
cast eyes, would smile thinly, not offended, not at all, and
continue her monstrous recitations. Shevek knew that Tak-
ver was right to laugh at her, but he could not do it.

"It's terrible." she said, slithering in past him and going
straight to the table to read Takver's letter. She picked
it up; Shevek plucked it out of her hand with a calm
rapidity she had not prepared for. "Perfectly terrible. Not
even a decad's notice. Just, 'Come here! Right now!'
And they say we're free people, we're supposed to be free
people. What a joke! Breaking up a happy partnership that
way. That's why they did it, you know. They're against
partnerships, you can see it all the time, they intentionally
post partners apart. That's what happened with me and
Labeks, exactly the same thing. Well never get back
together. Not with the whole of Divlab lined up against us.
There's the little empty crib. Poor little thing! She never
ceased crying these four decads, day and night. Kept me
awake for hours. It's the shortages, of course; Takver just
didn't have enough milk. And then to send a nursing
mother off to a posting hundreds of miles away like that,
imagine! I don't suppose you'll be able to join her there,
where is it they sent her to?"

209

"Northeast I want to get over to breakfast, Bunub.

Tm hungry."                                      „

"Isn't it typical how they did it while you were away.

"Did what while I was away?"

"Sent her away—broke up the partnership." She was
reading Sabul's note, which she had uncrumpled with care.
*They know when to move inl I suppose you'll be leav-
ing this room now, wont you? They wont let you keep
a double. Takver talked about coming back soon, but I
could see she was just trying to keep her spirits up. Free-
dom, we're supposed to be free, big Jokel Pushed
around from here to there—"

"Oh, by damn, Bunub, if Takver hadn't wanted the
posting she'd have refused it. You know we're facing a
famine."

''Well. I wondered if she hadnt been looking for a move.
It often happens after a baby comes- I thought long ago
you should have given that baby to a nursery. The amount
it cried. Children come between partners. Tie them down.
It's only natural, as you say, that she should have been
looking for a change, and jumped at it when she got it"

"I did not say that I'm going to breakfast." He strode
out, quivering at five or six sensitive spots which Bunub
had accurately wounded. The horror of the woman was
that she voiced all his own most despicable fears. She
now stayed behind in the room, probably to plan her
move into it.

He had overslept and got to commons just before they
closed the doors. Ravenous still from the journey, he took
a double helping of both porridge and bread. The boy
behind the serving tables looked at him frowning. These
days nobody took double helpings. Shevek stared frown-
ing back and said nothing. He had gone eighty-odd hours
now on two bowls of soup and one kilo of bread, and he
had a right to make up for what he had missed, but he
was damned if he would explain. Existence is its own
Justification, need is right He was an Odoniaa, he left
guilt to profiteers.

He sat down by himself, but Desar joined him immedi-
ately, smiling, staring at or beside him with disconcerting
wall eyes. "Been gone while," Desar said.

"Farm draft. Six decads. How have things been here?*'

"Lean."

210

"They'll get leaner.'* Shevek said, but without real
conviction, for he was eating, and the porridge tasted
exceedingly good. Frustration, anxiety, famine! said his
forebrain, seat of intellect; but his hindbrain, squatting in
unrepentant savagery back in the deep skull's darkness,
said Food now! Food now! Good, good!

"Seen Sabul?"

"No. I got in late last night." He glanced up at Desar
and said with attempted indifference, 'Takver got a famine
posting; she had to leave four days ago."

Desar nodded with genuine indifference. "Heard that.
You hear about Institute reorganizing?"

"No. What's up?"

The mathematician spread out his long, slender hands
on me table and looked down at them. He was always
tongue-tied and telegraphic; in fact, he stammered; but
whether it was a verbal or a moral stammer Shevek had
never decided. As he had always liked Desar without know-
ing why, so there were moments when he disliked Desar
intensely, again without knowing why. This was one of
the moments. There was a slyness in the expression of
Desar's mouth, his downcast eyes, like Bunub's downcast
eyes.

"Shakedown. Cutting back to functional staff. Shipeg's
out." Shipeg was a notoriously stupid mathematician
who had always managed, by assiduous flattery of students,
to get himself one student-requisitioned course each term.
"Sent him off. Some regional institute."

"He'd do less harm hoeing ground-holum," Shevek said.
Now that he was fed, it appeared to him that the drought
might after all be of service to the social organism. The
priorities were becoming clear again. Weaknesses, soft
spots, sick spots would be scoured out, sluggish organs re-
stored to full function, the fat would be trimmed off the
body politic.

"Put in word for you. Institute meeting," Desar said,
looking up but not meeting, because he could not meet,
Shevek's eyes. As he spoke, though Shevek did not yet
understand what he meant, he knew that Desar was lying.
He knew it positively. Desar had not put in a word for
him, but a word against him.

The reason for his moments of detesting Desar was
clear to him now: a recognition, heretofore unadmitted, of
211

the element of pure malice in Desar*s personality. That
Desar also loved him and was trying to gain power over
him was equally clear, and, to Shevek, equally detestable.
The devious ways of posseasivenesa, the labyrinths of
love/hate, were meaningless to him. Arrogant, intolerant,
he walked right through their walls. He did not speak
again to the mathematician, but finished his breakfast and
went off across the quadrangle, through the bright morn-
ing of early autumn, to the physics office.

He went to the back room which everybody called
"Sabul's office," the room where they had first met, where
Sabul had given him the grammar and dictionary of lotic.
Sabul looked up warily across the desk, looked down again,
busy with papers, the hardworking, abstracted scientist;

then allowed awareness of Shevek's presence to seep into
his overloaded brain; then became, for him, effusive. He
looked thin and aged, and when he got up he stooped
more than he had used to do, a placating kind of stoop.
"Bad times," he said. "Eh? Bad timest"

'They'll get worse," Shevek said lightly. "How's every-
thing here?"

"Bad, bad." Sabul shook his grizzled head. "This is a bad
time for pure science, for the intellectual."

"Is there ever a good one?"

Sabul produced an unnatural chuckle.

"Did anything come in for us on the summer shipments
from Urras?" Shevek inquired, clearing off sitting room on
the bench. He sat down and crossed his legs. His light skin
had tanned and the fine down that covered his face had
bleached to silver while he worked in the fields in South-
rising. He looked spare, and sound, and young, compared
to Sabul. Both men were aware of the contrast

"Nothing of interest."

"No reviews of the Principles?"

"No." SabuTs tone was surly, more like himself.

"No letters?"

'•No."

"That's odd."

"What's odd about it? What did you expect, a lecture-
ship at leu Eun University? The Seo Oen Prize?"

"I expected reviews and replies. There's been time." He
said this as Sabul said, "Hardly been time for reviews yet"

There was a pause.

212

"You'll have to realize, Shevek, that a mere conviction
of rightness isn't self-justifying. You worked hard on the
book, I know. I worked hard editing if too, trying to
make clear that it wasn't just an irresponsible attack on
Sequency theory, but had positive aspects- But if other
physicists don't see value in your work, then you've got to
begin looking at the values you hold and seeing where the
discrepancy lies. If it means nothing to other people, what's
the good of it? What's its function?"

"I'm a physicist, not a functions analyst," Shevek said
amiably.

"Every Odonian has to be a functions analyst You're
thirty, aren't you? By that age a man should know not
only his cellular function but his organic function—what
his optimum role in the social organism is. You havent
had to think about that, perhaps, as much as most peo-
ple-"

"No. Since I was ten or twelve Fve known what kind
of work I had to do."

"What a boy thinks he likes to do isnt always what his
society needs from him."

"I'm thirty, as you say. Rather an old boy.**

"You've reached that age in an unusually sheltered,
protected environment First the Northsetting Regional
Institute—"

"And a forest project, and farm projects, and practical
trainingi and block committees, and volunteer work since
the drought; the usual amount of necessary kleggich. I
like doing it, in fact But I do physics too. What are you
getting at?"

As Sabul did not answer but merely glared under his
heavy, oily brows, Shevek added, "You might as well say
it plainly, because you're not going to arrive at it by way
of my social conscience."

"Do you consider the work you*ve done here func-
tional?"

"Yes. The more that is organized, the more central the
organism: centrality here implying the field of real func-
tion.' Tomar's Definitions. Since temporal physics attempts
to organize everything comprehensible to the human mind,
it is by definition a centrally functional activity."

"It doesn't get bread into people's mouths."

"I just spent six decads helping to do that. When I'm
213

called again, HI go again. Meanwhile I stick by my trade.
If there's physics to be done, I claim the right to do it."

"What you have to face is the fact that at this point
there is no physics to be done. Not the kind you do.
We've got to gear to practicality." Sabul shifted in his
chair. He looked sullen and uneasy. "We've had to release
five people for reposting. I'm sorry to say that you're one
of them. There it is."

"Just where I thought it was,** Shevek said, though in
fact he had not till that moment realized that Sabul was
kicking him out of the Institute- As soon as he heard it,
however, it seemed familiar news; and he would not give
Sabul the satisfaction of seeing him shaken.

"What worked against you was a combination of things.
The abstruse, irrelevant nature of the research you've
done these last several years. Plus a certain feeling, not
necessarily Justified, but existing among many student and
teaching members of the Institute, that both your teaching
and your behavior reflect a certain disaffection, a degree
of privatism, of nonaltruism. This was spoken of in meet-
ing. I spoke for you, of course. But I'm only one syndic
among many."                                     /

"Since when was altruism an Odoman virtue?" Shevek
said. "Well. never mind. I see what you mean." He stood
up. He could not keep seated any longer, but otherwise
had himself in control, and spoke perfectly naturally. "I
take it you didst recommend me for a teaching post else-
where.'*

"What would have been the use?" said Sabul, almost
melodious in self-exculpation. "No one's taking on new
teachers. Teachers and students are working side by side
at famine-prevention jobs all over the planet. Of course,
this crisis won't last. In a year or so we'll be looking back
on it, proud of the sacrifices we made and the work we
did, standing by each other, share and share alike. But
right now ..."

Shevek stood erect, relaxed, gazing out the small,
scratched window at the blank sky. There was a mighty
desire in him to tell Sabul, finally, to go to hell. But it was
a different and profounder impulse that found words.
"Actually," he said, "you're probably right." With that he
nodded to Sabul and left.

He caught an omnibus downtown. He was still in a
214

hurry, driven. He was following a pattern and wanted to
come to the end of it, come to rest. He went to the
Division of Labor Central Posting offices to request a post-
ing to the community to which Takver had gone.

Divlab, with its computers and its huge task of coordina-
tion, occupied a whole square; its buildings were hand-
some, imposing by Anarresti standards, with fine, plain
lines. Inside, Central Posting was high-ceilinged and barn-
like, very full of people and activity, the walls covered
with posting notices and directions as to which desk or
department to go to for this business or that. As Shevek
waited in one of the lines he- listened to the people in
front of him, a boy of sixteen and a man in his sixties.
The boy was volunteering for a famine-prevention posting.
He was full of noble feelings, spflling over with brother-
hood, adventurousness, hope. He was delighted to be going
off on his own, leaving his childhood behind. He talked a
great deal, like a child, in a voice not yet used to its
deeper tones. Freedom, freedom! rang in his excited talk,
in every word; and the old man's voice grumbled and
rumbled through it, teasing but not threatening, mocking
but not cautioning. Freedom, the ability to go somewhere
and do something, freedom was what the old man
praised and cherished in the young one, even while he
mocked his self-importance. Shevek listened to them with
pleasure. They broke the morning's series of grotesques.

As soon as Shevek explained where he wanted to go,
the clerk got a worried look, and went off for an atlas,
which she opened on the counter between them. "Now
look," she said. She was an ugly little woman with buck
teeth; her bands on the colored pages of the atlas were
deft and soft. "That's Rolny, see, the peninsula sticking
down into the North Temaenian. It's just a huge sandpit
There's nothing on it at all but the marine laboratories
away out there at the end, see? Then the coast's all swamp
and salt marsh till you get clear round here to Harmony
—a thousand kilometers. And west of it is the Coast
Barrens. The nearest you could get to Rolny would be
some town in the mountains. But they're not asking for
emergency postings there; they're pretty self-sufficing. Of
course, you could go there anyhow," she added in a slight-
ly different tone.

"It's too far from Rolny," he said, looking at the map,
215

noticing in the mountains of Northeast the little isolated
town where Takver had grown up. Round Valley. "Don't
they need a janitor at the marine lab? A statistician? Some-
body to feed the fish?"

"I'll check."

The human/computer network of ffles in Divlab was
set up with admirable efficiency. It did not take the clerk
five minutes to get the desired information sorted out
from the enormous, continual input and outgo of infor-
mation concerning every job being done, every position
wanted, every workman needed, and the priorities of
each in the general economy of the world-wide society.
"They just filled an emergency draft—that's the partner,
isn't it? They got everybody they wanted, four technicians
and an experienced seiner. Staff complete."

Shevek leaned his elbows on the counter and bowed his
head, scratching it, a gesture of confusion and defeat
masked by self-consciousness. "Well," he said, "I don't
know what to do."

"Look, brother, how long is the partner's posting?"

"Indefinite."

"But it's a famine-prevention job, isn't it? It's not going
to go on like this forever. It can'tl It'll rain, this winter."

He looked up into his sister's earnest, sympathetic, har-
ried face. He smiled a little, for he could not leave her
effort to give hope without response.

"You'll get back together. Meanwhile—*'

"Yes. Meanwhile," he said.

She awaited his decision.

It was his to make; and the options were endless. He
could stay in Abbenay and organize classes in physics if
he could find volunteer students. He could go to Rolny
Peninsula and live with Takver though without any place
in the research station. He could live anywhere and do
nothing but get up twice a day and go to the nearest com-
mons to be fed. He could do what he pleased.

The identity of the words "work" and "play" in Pravic
had, of course, a strong ethical significance. Odo had
seen the danger of a rigid moralism arising from the use
of the word "work" in her analogic system: the cells must
work together, the optimum working of the organism,
the work done by each element, and so forth. Cooperation
and function, essential concepts of the Analogy, both im-
216

plied work. The proof of an experiment, twenty test tubes
in a laboratory or twenty million people on the Moon, is
simply, does it work? Odo had seen the moral trap. "The
saint is never busy," she had said, perhaps wistfully.

But the choices of the social being are never made
alone.

"Well," Shevek said, "I Just came back from a famine-
prevention posting. Anything else like that need doing?'*

The clerk gave him an elder-sisterly look, incredulous
but forgiving. 'There's about seven hundred Urgent calls
posted around the room," she said. "Which one would
you like?"

"Any of them need math?"

'They're mostly farming and skilled labor. Do yon
have any engineering training?"

"Not much."

"Well, there's work-coordinating. That certainly takes a
head for figures. How about this one?"

"All right."

"That's down in Southwest, in the Dust, you know."

"I've been in the Dust before. Besides, as you say,
someday it will rain. .. .*'

She nodded, smiling, and typed onto his Divlab record:

FROM Abbenay, NW Cent lust Sci, TO Elbow, SW. wk
co, phosphate mill #1: EMERG PSTG: 5-1-3-165— in-
definite.

217

• ;

s

Chapter 9




Shevek was awakened by the bells in the chapel tower
pealing the Prime Harmony for morning religious service.
Each note was like a blow on the back of his head. He
was so sick and shaky he could not even sit up for a long
time. He finally managed to shuffle into the bathroom and
take a long cold bath, which relieved the headache; but his
whole body continued to fed strange to him—to feel,
somehow, vile. As he began to'-be able to think again,
fragments and moments of the night/ before came into his'
mind, vivid, senseless little scenes frdpa the party at Vea's.
He tried not to think about them, *nd then could think
of nothing else. Everything, everytliing became vile. He'
sat down at his desk, and sat th^re staring, motionless,
perfectly miserable, for half an hour.

He had been embarrassed often enough, and had felt
himself a fool. As a young man he had suffered from tho
sense that others thought him strange, unlike them; in later
years he had felt, having deliberately invited, the anger
and contempt of many of his fellows on Anarres. But he
had never really accepted their Judgment. He had never
been ashamed.

He did not know that this paralyzing humiliation was 8
chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache. Nor
218

would the knowledge have made much difference to him.
Shame—the sense of vileness and of self-estrangement—•
was a revelation. He saw with a new clarity, a hideous
clarity; and saw far past those incoherent memories of the
end of the evening at Vea's. It was not only poor Vea who
had betrayed him. It was not only the alcohol that he
had tried to vomit up; it was all the bread he had eaten on
Urras.

He leaned his elbows on the desk and put his head
in his hands, pressing in on the temples, the cramped
position of pain; and he looked at his life in the light of
shame.

On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expecta-
tions of his society, to do the work he was individually
called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the
Bake of society.

Here on Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-
indulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not
society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.

On his first night in this room be had asked them, chal-
lenging and curious, "What are you going to do with
me?" He knew now what they had done with him.
Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him.
He had thought to bargain with them, a very naive anar-
chist's notion. The individual cannot bargain with the
State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it
issues the coins itself.

He saw now—in detail, item by item from the begin-
ning—that he had made a mistake in coming to Urras; his
first big mistake, and one that was likely to last him the
rest of his life. Once he had seen it, once he had rehearsed
all the evidences of it that he had suppressed and denied
for months—and it took him a long time, sitting there
motionless at his desk—until he had arrived at the
ludicrous and abominable last scene with Vea, and had
lived through that again too, and felt his face go hot until
his ears sang: then he was done with it. Even in this
postalcoholic vale of tears, he felt no guilt. That was all
done, now, and what must be thought about was, what
must he do now? Having locked himself in jail, how might
he act as a free man?

He would not do physics for the politicians. That was;

clear, now.

219

If he stopped working, would they let him go home?

At this, he drew a long breath and raised his head,
looking with unseeing eyes at the sunlit green landscape
out the window. It was the first dme he had let himself
think of going home as a genuine possibility. The thought
threatened to break down the gates and flood him with
urgent yearning. To speak Pravic, to speak to friends, to
see Takver, Pilun, Sadik, to touch the dust of Anarres....

They would not let him go. He had not paid his way.
Nor could he let himself go: give up and run.

As he sat at the desk in the bright morning sunlight he
brought his hands down against the edge of the desk
deliberately and sharply, twice, three times; his face was
calm and appeared thoughtful,

"Where do I go?" he said aloud.

A knock on the door. Efor came in with a breakfast
tray and the morning papers. "Come in at six usual but
catching up your sleep," he observed, setting out the
tray with admirable deftness.

"I got drunk last night," Shevek said.

"Beautiful while it lasts." said Efor. "That be all/sir?
Very well," and he exited with the same deftness, bowing
on the way to Pae, who entered as he left.

"Didn't mean to barge in on your breakfast! On my
way back from chapel, just thought I'd look in."

"Sit down. Have some chocolate." Shevek was unable
to eat unless Pae made some pretense at least of eating
with him. Pae took a honey roll and crumbled it about
on a plate. Shevek still felt rather shaky but very hungry
now, and attacked his breakfast with energy. Pae seemed
to find it harder than usual to start conversation.

"You're still getting this trash?" he asked at last in an
amused tone, touching the folded newspapers Efor had
set on the table.

"Efor brings them."

"Does he?"

"I asked him to," Shevek said, glancing at Pae, a split-
second reconnoitering glance. 'They broaden my compre-
hension of your country. I take an interest in your lower
classes. Most Anarresti came from the lower classes."

"Yes, of course," the younger man said, looking respect-
ful and nodding. He ate a small bite of honey roll. "I think
I'd like a drop of that chocolate after all," he said, and
220

rang the bell on the tray. Efor appeared at the door.
"Another cup," Pae said without turning. "Well, sir, we'd
looked forward to taking you about again, now the
weather's turning fine, and showing you more of the
country. Even a visit abroad, perhaps. But this damned
war has put an end to all such plans, I'm afraid."

Shevek looked at the headline of the topmost paper:

10, THU CLASH NEAR BENBILI CAPITAL.

'There's later news than that on the telefax," Pae said.
"We've liberated the capital. General Havevert will be
reinstalled."

"Then the war is over?"

"Not while Thu still holds the two eastern provinces."

**I see. So your army and Thu*s army will fight in
Benbili. But not here?"

**No. no. It would be utter folly for them to invade us,
or us them. We've outgrown the kind of barbarism that
used to bring war into the heart of the high civilizations!
The balance of power is kept by this kind of police action.
However, we are officially at war. So an the tiresome old
restrictions will come into effect, I'm afraid."

"Restrictions?"

"Classification of research done in the College of
Noble Science, for one thing. Nothing to it, really, just a
government rubber stamp. And sometimes a delay getting
a paper published, when the higher-ups think it must be
^dangerous because they dont understand it! ... And
travel's a bit limited, especially for you and the other non-
nationals here, I'm afraid. So long as the state of war
lasts, you're not actually supposed to leave the campus,
I believe, without clearance from the Chancellor. But
pay no attention to that. I can get you out of here when-
ever you like without going through all the rigmarole.**

"You hold the keys," Shevek said, with an ingenuous
ismfle.

"Oh, Fm an absolute specialist in it. I love getting
around rules and outwitting the authorities. Perhaps I'm a
natural anarchist, eh? Where the devil is that old fool
I sent for a cup?"

**He must go down to the kitchens to get one."
"Needn't take half the day about it. Well, I won't wait.
Don't want to take up what's left of your morning. By the
way, did you see the latest Bulletin of the Space Research
221

Foundation? They print Reumere's plans for the ansible."

"What is the ansible?"

"It's what he's calling an instantaneous communication
device. He says if the temporalists—that's you, of course
'—will just work out the time-inertia equations, the en-
gineers—that's him—will be able to build the damned
thing, test it, and thus incidentally prove the validity of
the theory, within months or weeks."

"Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of
causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built
before I have provided the cause.** He smiled again, rather
less ingenuously- When Pae had shut the door behind him-
self, Shevek suddenly stood up. "You filthy profiteering
liarl" he said in Pravic, white with rage, his hands clenched
to keep them from picking something up and throwing
it after Pae.

Efor came in carrying a cup and saucer on a tray. He
stopped short, looking apprehensive.

"It's all right, Efor. He didn't—He didn't want the cup.
You can take it all now."

"Very good, sir."                             /

"Listen. I should like no visitors, for a while. Can you
keep them out?"

"Easy sir. Anybody special?"

**Yes, him. Anybody. Say I am working."

**He'U be glad to hear that, sir," Efor said, his wrinkles
melting with malice for an instant; then with respectful
familiarity, "Nobody you don't want get past roe," and
finally with formal propriety, "Thank you, sir, and good
morning."

Food, and adrenalin, had dispelled Shevek'a paralysis.
He walked up and down the room, irritable and restless.
He wanted to act He had spent nearly a year now doing
nothing, except being a fool. It was time he did something.

Well, what had he come here to do?

To do physics. To assert, by his talent, the rights of any
citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained
while working, and to share the product with all who
wanted it The rights of an Odonian and of a human
being.

His benevolent and protective hosts let him work, and
maintained him while working, all right The problem
came on the third limb. But he himself had not got
222

there yet. He had not done his job. He couldn't share
what he didn't have.

He went back to the desk, sat down, and took a couple
of scraps of heavily scribbled paper out of the least ac-
cessible and least useful pocket of his tight-fitting, stylish
trousers. He spread these scraps out with his fingers and
looked at them. It occurred to him that he was getting to
be like Sabul, writing very small, in abbreviations, on
shreds of paper. He knew now why Sabul did it: he was
possessive and secretive. A psychopathy on Anarres was
rational behavior on Urraa.

Again Shevek sat quite motionless, his head bowed,
studying the two little bits of paper on which he had noted
down certain essential points of the General Temporal
Theory, so far as it went.

For the next three days he sat at the desk and looked at
the two bits of paper.

At times he got up and walked around the room, or
Wrote something down, or employed the desk computer, or
asked Efor to bring him something to eat, or lay down
and fell asleep. Then he went back to the desk and sat
there.

On the evening of the third day he was sitting, for a
change, on the marble seat by the hearth. He had sat down
there on the first night he entered this room, this gracious
prison cell, and generally sat there when he had visitors.
He had no visitors at the moment, but he was thinking
about Saio Pae.

Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted.
There was a trivial, abortive quality to his roind; it lacked
depth, affect imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive in-
strument Yet its potentiality had been real, and though
deformed had not been lost. Pae was a very clever physi-
cist. Or, more exactly, he was very clever about physics.
He had not done anything original, but his opportunism,
his sense for where advantage lay, led him time after time
to the most promising field. He had the flair for where to
set to work, just as Shevek did, and Shevek respected it in
him as in himself, for it is a sinpilariy important attri-
bute in a scientist. It was Pae who had given Shevek the
book translated from the Terran, the symposium on the
theories of Relativity, the ideas of which had come to oc-
cupy his mind more and more of late. Was it possible that
223

after an he had come to Urras simply to meet Saio Pae,
his enemy? That he had come seeking him, knowing that
he might receive from his enemy what he could not re^
ceive from his brothers and friends, what no Anarresti
could give him: knowledge of the foreign, of the alien:

news....

He forgot Pae. He thought about the book. He could
not state clearly to himself what, exactly, he had found so
stimulating about it Most of the physics in it was, after
all, outdated; the methods were cumbersome, and the alien
attitude sometimes quite disagreeable. The Terrans had
been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even
Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled
to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but
the physical and should not be taken as implying the
metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of
course, was auperficially true; and yet he had used number,
the bridge between the rational and the perceived, be-
tween psyche and matter, "Number the Indisputable," as
the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To
employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode
that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had
known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that
he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality -

Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the
Terran's thought Shevek caught this combination, was
constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too,
had been after a unifying field theory. Haying explained
the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of
spacedme, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include
electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even dur-
ing his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the
physicists of his own world had turned away from his
effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoher-
ences of quantum theory with its high technological yields,
at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclu-
sively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of
imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound:

at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the
indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept.
And his refusal had been equally correct—in the long run.
Only he had lacked the tools to prove it—the Saeba
variables and the theories of infinite velocity and complex
224

cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it
existed on terms which he might not have been willing to
accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had
been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of
Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever
after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hy-
pothesis that could not be proved true and that could be
and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.

But was not a theory of which all the elements were
provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the un-
provable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for
breaking out of the circle and going ahead.

In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis
of real coexistence—the problem which Shevek had been
pounding his head against desperately for these last three
days. and indeed these last ten years—really matter?

He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if
it were something he could possess. He had been demand-
ing a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and
which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply as-
suming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to
use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would
be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear.
The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Sae-
ban transformation series; thus approached, successivity
and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental
unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view
became plain; the concept of interval served to connect
the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How
could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen
it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed
he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was
to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the meth-
- od, given him by his understanding of a failure in the dis-
tant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear
and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than any-
thing else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all com-
plexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way
clear, the way home, the light.

The spirit in him was like a child running out into the
sunlight There was no end, no end....

And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with
fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears,
225

as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh
is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange,
to know that one's life has been fulfilled.

Yet he kept looking, and going farther, with that same
childish joy, until all at once he could not go any farther;

he came back, and looking around through his tears saw
that the room was dark and the high windows were full
of stars.

The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try
to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him.
He was in its keeping.

After a while he got up shakily and lighted the lamp. He
wandered around the room a little, touching things, the
binding of a book, the shade of a lamp, glad to be back
among these familiar objects, back in his own world—for
at this instant the difference between this planet and that
one, between Urras and.Anarres, was no more significant
to him than the difference between two grains of sand on
the shore of the sea. There were no more abysses, no
more walls. There was no more exile. He had seen the
foundations of the universe, and they were solid.

He went into the bedroom, walking slowly and a little
unsteadily, and dropped onto the bed without undressing.
He lay there with his arms behind his head, occasionally
foreseeing and planning one detail or another of the work
that had to be done, absorbed in a solemn and delightful
thankfulness, which merged gradually into serene reverie,
and then into sleep.

He slept for ten hours. He woke up thinking of the equa-
tions that would express the concept of interval. He went
to the desk and set to work on them. He had a class that
afternoon, and met it; he took his dinner at the Senior
Faculty commons and talked with his colleagues there
about the weather, and the war, and whatever else they
brought up. If they noticed any change in him he did not
know it, for he was not really aware of them at all. He
came back to his room and worked.

The Urrasti counted twenty hours in the day. For eight
days he spent twelve to sixteen hours daily at his desk, or
roaming about his room, his light eyes turned often to the
windows, outside which shone the warm spring sunlight,
or the stars and the tawny, waning Moon,
226

Coming in with the breakfast tray, Efor found him lying
half-dressed on the bed, his eyes shut, talking in a foreign
language. He roused him. Shevek woke with a convulsive
start, got up and staggered into the other room, to the
desk, which was perfectly empty; he stared at the com-
puter, which had been cleared, and then stood there like a
man who has been hit on the head and does not know it
yet. Efor succeeded in getting him to lie down again and
said, "Fever there, sir. Call the doctor?"

"Not"

"Sure, sir?"

"Nol Don't let anybody in here. Say I am ill, Efor."

"Then they'll fetch the doctor sure. Can say you're still
working, sir. They like that"

"Lock the door when you go out," Shevek said. His
nontransparent body had let him down; he was weak with
exhaustion, and therefore fretful and panicky. He was
afraid of Pae, of Oiie, of a police search party. Everything
he had heard, read, half-understood about the Urrasti po-
lice, the secret police, came vivid and terrible into his
memory, as when a man admitting his illness to himself re-
calls every word he ever read about cancer. He stared up
at Efor in feverish distress.

"You can trust me," the man said in his subdued, wry,
quick way. He brought Shevek a glass of water and went
out, and the lock of the outer door clicked behind him.

He looked after Shevek during the next two days, with a
tact that owed little to his training as a servant.

"Yov. should have been a doctor, Efor," Shevek said,
when his weakness had become a merely bodily, not un-
pleasant lassitude.

**What my old sow say. She never wants nobody nurse
her beside me when she get the pip. She say, 'You got the
touch.' I guess I do,"

"Did you ever work with the sick?"

"No sir. Don't want to mix up with hospitals. Black day
the day I got to die in one of them pest-holes."

"The hospitals? What's wrong with them?"

"Nothing, sir, not them you be took to if you was
worse," Efor said with gentleness.

"What kind did you mean, then?"

"Our kind. Dirty. Like a trashman's ass-hole," Efor
said, without violence, descriptively. "Old. Kid die in one.
227

There's holes in the floor, big holes, the beams show
through, see? I say, 'HOW come?* See, rats come up the
holes, right in the beds. They say. 'Old building, been a
hospital six hundred years.* Stablishment of the Divine
Harmony for the Poor, its name. An ass-hole what it is."

"It was your child that died in the hospital?**

"Yes, sir, my daughter Laia."

"What did she die of?"

"Valve in her heart. They say. She don't grow much.
Two years old when she die."

"You have other children?"

**Not living. Three born. Hard on the old sow. But now
she say. *0h, well, don't have to be heartbreaking over 'em,
just as well after all!* Is there anything else I can do for
you, sir?" The sudden switch to upper-class syntax jolted
Shevek; he said impatiently. "Yes! Go on talking."

Because he had spoken spontaneously, or because he
was unwell and should be humored, this time Efor did not
stiffen up. *Think of going for army medic, one time," he
«aid, "but they get me first. Draft. Say, 'Orderly, you be
orderly.' So I do. Good training, orderly. Come out of the
army straight into gentlemen's service."

"You could have been trained as a medic, in the army?"
The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to
follow, both in language and in substance. He was being
told about things he had no experience of at all. He had
never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asy-
lum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or
a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who
wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead
baby in a ditch. All these things occurred in Efor's remi-
niscences as commonplaces or as commonplace horrors.
Shevek had to exercise his imagination and summon every
scrap of knowledge he had about Urras to understand
them at an. And yet they were familiar to him in a way
that nothing he had yet seen here was, and he did under-
stand.

This was the Urras he had learned about m school on
Anarres. This was the world from which his ancestors had
fled, preferring hunger and the desert and endless exile.
This was the world that had formed Odo's mind and had
jailed her eight times for speaking it. This was the human
228

suffering in which the ideals of his society were rooted, the
ground from which they sprang.

It was not "the real Urras." The dignity and beauty of
^       the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to

•I-       which Efor was native. To him a thinking man's job was
^        not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to
^        Include and to connect. It was not an easy job.
^          "Look tired again, sir," Efor said. "Better rest."
",           "No, Fm not tired."

Efor observed him a moment. When Efor functioned as
a servant his lined, clean-shaven face was quite expression-
less; during the last hour Shevek had seen it go through ex-
traordinary changes of harshness, humor, cynicism, and
pain. At the moment its expression was sympathetic yet
detached.

"Different from all that where you come from," Efor
i       said.
f         "Very different."

**Nobody ever out of work, there."
^          There was a faint edge of irony, or question, in his

voice.
;            ^o."

"And nobody hungry?"
]|         "Nobody goes hungry while another eats."
^         "Ah."

^         "But we have been hungry. We have starved. There was
<;'       a famine, you know, eight years ago. I knew a woman
^       then who killed her baby, because she had no milk, and

•         there was nothing else, nothing else to give it. It is not all

^        ... all milk and honey on Anarres, Efor."

i--          "I don't doubt it, sir," Efor said with one of his curious

H        returns to polite diction. Then he said with a grimace,

%       drawing his lips back from his teeth, "All the same there's

|       none of them there!"

S        "Them?"

^         "You know, Mr. Shevek. What you said once. The

^        owners."

?

The next evening Atro called by. Pae must have been on
t        the watch, for a few minutes after Efor admitted the old

•^        man, he came strolling in, and inquired with charming
)        sympathy after Shevek's indisposition- "You've been work-
fc.       ing much too hard these last couple of weeks, sir,'* he said,
229

"you mustn't wear yourself out like this." He did not sit
down, but took his leave very soon, the soul of civility.
Atro went on talking about the war in Benbili, which was
becoming, as he put it, "a large-scale operation."

"Do the people in this country approve of this war?"
Shevek asked, interrupting a discourse on strategy. He had
been puzzled by the absence of moral judgment in the
birdseed papers on this subject. They had given up their
ranting excitement; their wording was often exactly the
same as that of the telefax bulletins issued by the govern-
ment.

"Approve? You don't think we'd lie down and let the
damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world
power is at stake!"

"But I meant the people, not the government The . . .
the people who must fight."

"What's it to them? They're used to mass conscriptions.
It's what they're for, my dear fellow! To fight for their
country. And let me tell you, there's no better soldier on
earth than the loti man of the ranks, once he's broken in
to taking orders. In peacetime he may spout sentimental
pacifism, but the grit's there, underneath. The common
soldier has always been our greatest resource as a nation.
It's how we became the leader we are."

"By climbing up on a pile of dead children?'* Shevek
said, but anger or, perhaps, an unadmitted reluctance to
hurt the old man's feelings, kept his voice muffled, and
Atro did not hear him.

"No," Atro went on, "you'll find the soul of the people
true as steel, when the country's threatened. A few rabble-
rousers in Nio and the mill towns make a big noise be-
tween wars, but it's grand to see how the people close
ranks when the flag's in danger. You're unwilling to be-
lieve that, I know. The trouble with Odonianism, you
know, my dear fellow, is that it's womanish. It simply
doesn't include the virile side of life. *Blood and steel,
battle's brightness,* as the old poet says. It doesn't under-
stand courage—love of the flag."

Shevek was silent for a minute; then he said, gently,
**That may be true, in part. At least, we have no flags."

When Atro had gone, Efor came in to take out the din-
ner tray. Shevek stopped him. He came up close to him.
saying, "Excuse me, Efor," and put a slip of paper down
230

on the tray. On it he had written, "Is there a microphone
in this room?"

The servant bent his head and read it, slowly, and then
looked up at Shevek, a long look at short range. Thea
his eyes glanced for a second at the chimney of the fire-
place.

"Bedroom?" Shevek inquired by the same means.

Efor shook his head, put the tray down, and followed
Shevek into the bedroom. He shut the door behind him
with the noiselessness of a good servant.

"Spotted that one first day, dusting," he said with a grin
that deepened the lines on his face into harsh ridges.

"Not ia here?**

Efor shrugged. "Never spotted it. Could run the water in
there, sir, like they do in the spy stories."

They proceeded on into the magnificent gold and ivory
temple of the shitstool. Efor turned on the taps and
then looked around the walls. "No," he said. "Don't think
so. And spy eye I could spot Oet onto them when I work
for a man in Nio once. Can't miss 'em once you get onto

*em."

Shevek took another piece of paper out of his pocket
and showed it to Efor. "Do you know where this came
from?"

It was the note he had found in his coat, "Join with us
your brothers."

After a pause—he read slowly, moving his closed lips

—Efor said, "I don't know where it come from."

Shevek was disappointed. It had occurred to him that
Efor himself was in an excellent position to slip something
into his "master's" pocket

"Know who it come from. In a manner."

"Who? How can I get to them?"

Another pause. "Dangerous business, Mr. Shevek." He
turned away and increased the rush of water from the
taps.

"I dont want to involve you. If you can just tell me—
tell me where to go. What I should ask for. Even one

name."

A still longer pause. Efor's face looked pinched and
hard. "I don't—" he said, and stopped. Then he said,
abruptly, and very low, "Look, Mr. Shevek, God knows,
they want you, we need you, but look, you don't know
231

what it's like. How you going to hide? A man like you?
Looking like you look? This a trap here, but it's a trap any-
where. You can run but you can't hide. I don't know what
to tell you. Give you names, sure. Ask any Nioti, he tell
you where to go. We had about enough. We got to have
some air to breathe. But you get caught, shot, how do I
feel? I work for you eight months, I come to like you. To
admire you. They approach me all the time. I say, 'No. Let
him be. A good man and he got no part of our troubles.
Let him go back where he come from where the people
are free. Let somebody go free from this God damned
prison we living inl*"

"I cant go back. Not yet. I want to meet these people."

Efor stood silent. Perhaps it was his life's habit as a
servant, as one who obeys, that made him no'd at last and
say, whispering, "Tuio Maedda, he who you want. In
Joking Lane, in Old Town. The grocery."          \

"Pae says I am forbidden to leave the campus. They
can stop me if they see me take the train."

Taxi, maybe," Efor said. **I call you one, you go down
by the stairs. I know Kae Oimon on the stand. He got
sense. But I don't know."

"All right Right now. Pae was just here, he saw me, he
thinks I'm staying in because I'm ill. What time is it?"

"Half past seven."

"H I go now, I have the night to find where I should
go. Call the taxi, Efor."

"111 pack you a bag, sir—*'

"A bag of what?"

"YouTI need clothes—"

"I'm wearing clothes! Go on.**

**You can't just go with nothing," Efor protested. This
made him more anxious and uneasy than anything else.
"You got money?"

"Oh—yes. I should take that."

Shevek was on the move already; Efor scratched his
head, looked grim and dour, but went off to the hall
phone to call the taxi. He returned to find Shevek waiting
outside the hall door with his coat on. "Go downstairs,"
Efor said, grudgingly. "Kae be at the back door, five min-
utes. Tell him go out by Grove Road, no checkpoint there
like at the main gate. Don't go by the gate, they stop you
there sure."

232

"Will you be blamed for this, Efor?'*

They were both whispering.

"I don't know you gone. Morning, I say you don't get
up yet. Sleeping. Keep 'em off a while."

Shevek took him by the shoulders, embraced him, shook
his hand. "Thank you, Eforl"

"Good luck," the man said, bewUdered. Shevek was al-
ready gone.

Shevek's costly day with Vea had taken most of his
ready cash, and the taxi ride in to Nio took ten units more.
He got out at a major subway station and by using his
map worked his way by subway into Old Town, a section
of the city he had never seen. Joking Lane was not on the
map, so he got off the train at the central stop for Old
Town. When he came up from the spacious marble sta-
tion into the street he stopped in confusion. This did not
look like Nio Esseia.

A fine, foggy rain was falling, and it was quite dark;

there were no street lights. The lampposts were there, but
the lights were not turned on, or were broken. Yellow
gleams slitted from around shuttered windows here and
there. Down the street, light streamed from an open door-
way, around which a group of men were lounging, talking
loud. The pavement, greasy with rain, was littered with
scraps of paper and refuse. The shopfronts, as well as he
could make them out, were low, and were all covered up
with heavy metal or wooden shutters, except for one
which had been gutted by fire and stood black and blank,
shards of glass still sticking in the frames of the broken
windows. People went by, silent hasty shadows-

An old woman was coming up the stairs behind him,
and he turned to her to ask his way. In the light of the
yellow globe that marked the subway entrance he saw her
face clearly: white and lined, with the dead, hostile stare
of weariness. Big glass earrings bobbed on her cheeks. She
climbed the stairs laboriously, hunched over with fatigue
or with arthritis or some deformity of the spine. But she
was not old, as he had thought; she was not even thirty.

**Can you tell me where Joldng Lane is," he asked her,
stammering. She glanced at him with indifference, hurried
her pace as she reached the top of the stairs, and went
on without a word.

233

He set off at random down the street. The excitement
of his sudden decision and flight from leu Eun had turned
to apprehension, a sense of being driven, hunted. He
avoided the group of men around the door, instinct warn-
ing him that the single stranger does not approach that
kind of group. When he saw a man ahead of him walking
alone, he caught up and repeated his question. The man
said, "I dont know," and turned aside.

There was nothing to do but go on. He came to a better-
lighted cross street, which wound off into the misty rain
in both directions in a dim, grim garisaoess of lighted
signs and advertisements. There were many wineshops and
pawnshops, some of them still open. A good many people
were in the street, jostling past, going in and out of the
wineshops. There was a man tying down, lying in the
gutter, his coat bunched up over his head, lying in the
rain, asleep, sick, dead. Shevek stared at him with horror,
and at the others who walked past without looking.

As he stood there paralyzed, somebody stopped by him
and looked up into his face, a short, unshaven, wry-necked
fellow of fifty or sixty, with red-rimmed eyes and a tooth-
less mouth opened in a laugh. He stood and laughed wit-
lessly at the big, terrified man, pointing a shaky hand at
him. "Where you get all that hair, eh, en, that hair, where
you get all that hair," he mumbled.

"Can—can you tell me how to get to Joking Lane?**

"Sure, joking, I'm joking, no joke I'm broke. Hey you
got a little blue for a drink on a cold night? Sure you got a
little blue."

He came closer. Shevek drew away, seeing the open
hand but not understanding.

"Come on, take a joke mister, one little blue," the man
'mumbled without threat or pleading, mechanically, his
mouth still open in the meaningless grin, his hand held
out

Shevek understood. He groped in his pocket, found the
last of his money, thrust it into the beggar's hand, and
then, cold with a fear that was not fear for himself, pushed
past the man, who was mumbling and trying to catch at his
coat, and made for the nearest open door. It was under a
sign that read 'Tawn and Used Goods Best Values." In-
side, among the racks of wom-out coats, shoes, shawls,
battered instruments, broken lamps, odd dishes, canisters,
234

spoons, beads, wrecks and fragments, every piece of rub-
bish marked with its price, he stood trying to collect him-
self.

"Looking for something?"

He put his question once more.

The shopkeeper, a dark man as tall as Shevek but
atooped and very thin, looked him over. "What you want
to get there for?"

"I'm looking for a person who lives there."

"Where you from?"

"I need to get to this street. Joking Lane. Is it far from
here?"

"Where you from, mister?*'

"I am from Anarres, from the Moon," Shevek said an-
grily. "I have to get to Joking Lane, now, tonight."

"You're him? The scientist fellow? What the hell you
doing here?"

"Getting away from the police! Do you want to tell
them I'm here, or will you help me?"

"God damn," the man said. "God damn. Look—" He
hesitated, was about to say something, about to say some-
thing else, said, "You Just go on," and in the same breath
though apparently with a complete change of mind, said,
"All right. I'm closing. Take you there. Hold on- God
danml"

He rummaged in the back of the shop, switched off the
light, came outside with Shevek, pulled down metal shut-
ters and locked them, padlocked the door, and set off at a
sharp pace, saying, "Come on!"

They walked twenty or thirty blocks, getting deeper into
the maze of crooked streets and alleys in the heart of Old
Town. The misty rain fell softly in the unevenly lit dark-
ness, bringing out smells of decay, of wet stone and metal.
They turned down an unlit, unsigned alley between high
old tenements, the ground floors of which were mostly
shops. Shevek's guide stopped and knocked on the shut-
tered window of one: V. Maedda, Fancy Groceries. After a
good while the door was opened. The pawnbroker con-
ferred with a person inside, then gestured to Shevek, and
they both entered. A girl had let them in. "Tuio's in back.
come on," she said, looking up into Shevek's face in the
weak light from a back hallway. "Are you him?" Her
235

voice was faint and urgent-, she smHed strangely. "Are
you really him?"

Tuio. Maedda was a dark man in his forties, with a
strained, intellectual face. He shut a book in which he had
been writing and got quickly to his feet as they entered. He
greeted the pawnbroker by name, but never took his eyes
off Shevek.

"He come to my shop asking the way here, Tuio. He
say he the, you know, the one from Anarres."

"You are, aren't you?" Maedda said slowly. "Shevek.
What are you doing here?" He stared at Shevek with
alarmed, luminous eyes.

"Looking for help."

"Who sent you to me?"

"The first man I asked. I don't know who you are. I
asked him where I could go, he said to come to you."

"Does anybody else know you're here?"

"They don't know I've gone. Tomorrow they will.**

"Go get Remeivi," Maedda said to the girl. "Sit down,
Dr. Shevek. You'd better tell me what's going on."

Shevek sat down on a wooden chair but did not unfasten
his coat. He was so tired he was shaking. "I escaped," he
said. "From the University, from the jail. I don't know
where to go. Maybe it's all jails here. I came here because
they talk about the lower classes, the working classes, and
I thought, that sounds like my people. People who might
help each other."

"What kind of help are you looking for?"

Shevek made an effort to pull himself together. He
looked around the little, littered office, and at Maedda. "I
have something they want," he said. "An idea. A scientific
theory. I came here from Anarres because I thought that
here I could do the work and publish it. I didn't under-
stand that here an idea is a property of the State. I dont
work for a State. I can't take the money and the things
they give me. I want to get out. But I can't go home. So I
came here. You don't want my science, and maybe you
don't like your government either."

Maedda smiled, "No- I don't. But our government don't
like me any better. You didn't pick the safest place to
come, either for you or for us. ... Don't worry. Tonight's
tonight; well decide what to do."

Shevek took out the note he had found in his coat
236

pocket and handed it to Maedda. "This is what brought
me. Is it from people you know?"

" 'Join with us your brothers. .. .* I don't know. Could
be."

"Are you Odonians?**

"Partly. Syndicalists, libertarians. We work with the
Thuvianists, the Socialist Workers Union, but we're anti-
centralist. You arrived at a pretty hot moment, you know."

'The war?"

Maedda nodded. "A demonstration's been announced
for three days from now. Against the draft, war taxes, the
rise in food prices. There's four hundred thousand unem-
ployed in Nio Esseia, and they jack up taxes and prices."
He had been watching Shevek steadily all the time they
talked; now, as if the examination was done, he looked
away, leaning back in his chair. "This city's about ready
for anything. A strike is what we need, a general strike,
and massive demonstrations. Like the Ninth Month Strike
that Odo led," he added with a dry, strained smile. "We
could use an Odo now. But they've got no Moon to buy
us off with this time. We make justice here, or nowhere.'*
He looked back at Shevek, and presently said in a softer
voice, "Do you know what your society has meant, here,
to us, these last hundred and fifty years? Do you know
that when people here want to wish each other luck they
say, *May you get reborn on Anarres!' To know that it
exists, to know that there is a society without government,
without police, without economic exploitation, that they
can never say again that it's just a mirage, an idealist's
dreami I wonder if you fully understand why they've kept
you so well hidden out there at leu Eun, Dr. Shevek.
Why you never were allowed to appear at any meeting
open to the public. Why they'll be after you like dogs after
a rabbit the moment they find you're gone. It's not just be-
cause they want this idea of yours. But because you are an
idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh.

Walking amongst us."

*Then you've got your Odo," the girl said in her quiet,
urgent voice. She had re-entered as Maedda was speaking.
"After all, Odo was only an idea. Dr. Shevek is the proof."

Maedda was silent for a minute. "An undemonstrable
proof," he said.

"Why?"

237

*1f people know he's here, the police will know it too."
"Let them come and try to take him," the girl said, and

smiled.

"The demonstration is going to be absolutely nonvio-

lent," Maedda said with sudden violence. "Even the SWU

have accepted that!"

"I haven't accepted it, Tuio. I'm not going to let my
face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the black-
coats. If they hurt me, I'll hurt back."

"Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not

achieved by force!"

"And power isn't achieved by passivity.**

**We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of
power! What do you say?" Maedda appealed to Shevek.
"The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace
brings peace, only just acts bring justice! Wa cannot be
divided on that on the eve of action!"

Shevek looked at him, at the girl, and at the pawnbroker
who stood listening tensely near the door. He said in a
tired, quiet voice, "If I would be of use, use roe. Maybe I
could publish a statement on this in one of your papers. I
did not come to Urras to hide. If all the people know I am
here, maybe the government would be afraid to arrest me

in public? I don't know."

"That's it," Maedda said. "Of course.'* His dark eyes
blazed with excitement. "Where the devil is Remeivi? Go
call his sister, Siro, tell her to hunt him out and get him
over here.—Write why you came here, write about Anar"
res, write why you won't sell yourself to the government,
write what you like—we'll get it printed. Siro! Call
Meisthe too.—We'll hide you, but by God we'll let
ever man in A-Io know you're here, you're with us!"
The words poured out of him, his hands jerked as he
spoke, and he walked quickly back and forth across the
room. "And then, after the demonstration, after the strike,
we'll see. Maybe things will be different then! Maybe you

won't have to hide!"

"Maybe all the prison doors will fly open," Shevek said.

"Well, give me some paper, I'll write."

The girl Siro came up to him. Smiling, she stooped as
if bowing to him, a little timorously, with decorum, and
kissed him on the cheek; then she went out. The touch of
238

her lips was cool, and he felt it on his cheek for a long
time.

He spent one day in the attic of a tenement in Joking
Lane, and two nights and a day in a basement under a
used-furniture store, a strange dim place full of empty
mirror frames and broken bedsteads. He wrote. They
brought him what he had written, printed, within a few
hours: at first in the newspaper Modem Age, and later,
after the Modem Age presses had been closed down and
the editors arrested, as handbills run on a clandestine
press, along with plans and incitations for the demonstra-
tion and general strike. He did not read over what he had
written. He did not listen closely to Maedda and the others,
who described the enthusiasm with which the papers were
read, the spreading acceptance of the plan for the strike,
the effect his presence at the demonstration would make in
the eyes of the world. When they left him alone, some-
times he took a small notebook from his shirt pocket and
looked at the coded notes and equations of the General
Temporal Theory. He looked at them and could not read
them. He did not understand them. He put the notebook
away again and sat with his head between his hands.

Anarres had no flag to wave, but among the placards
proclaiming the general strike, and the blue and white
banners of the Syndicalists and the Socialist Workers, there
were many homemade signs showing the green Circle of
life, the old symbol of the Odoman Movement of two
hundred years before. All the flags and signs shone bravely
in the sunlight.

It was good to be outside, after the rooms with locked
doors, the hiding places. It was good to be walking, swing-
ing his aims, breathing the clear air of a spring morning.
To be among so many people, so immense a crowd, thou-
sands marching together, filling all the side streets as well
as the broad thoroughfare down which they marched, was
frightening, but it was exhilarating too. When they sang,
both the exhilaration and the fear became a blind exalta-
tion; he eyes filled with tears. It was deep, in the deep
streets, softened by open air and by distances, indistinct,
overwhelming, that lifting up of thousands of voices in
one song. The singing of the front of the march, far away
239

up the street, and of the endless crowds coming on behind,
was put out of phase by the distance the sound must
travel, so that the melody seemed always to be lagging
and catching up with itself, like a canon, and all the parts
of the song were being sung at one time, in the same mo-
ment, though each singer sang the tune as a line from be-
ginning to end.

He did not know their songs, and only listened and was
borne along on the music, until from up front there came
sweeping back wave by wave down the great slow-moving
river of people a tune he knew. He lifted his head and
sang it with them, in his own language as he had learned
it: the Hymn of the Insurrection. It had been sung in these
streets, in this same street, two hundred years ago, by these
people, his people.

0 eastern light, awaken
Those who have slept!
The darkness will be broken,
The promise kept.

They fell silent in the ranks around Shevek to hear him,
and he sang aloud, smiling, walking forward with them.

There might have been a hundred thousand human be-
ings in Capitol Square, or twice that many. The individuals,
like the particles of atomic physics, could not be counted,
nor their positions ascertained, nor their behavior pre-
dicted. And yet, as a mass, that enormous mass did what it
had been expected to do by the organizers of the strike: it
gathered, marched in order, sang, filled Capitol Square and
all the streets around, stood in its numberlessness restless
yet patient in the bright noon listening to the speakers,
whose single voices, erratically amplified, clapped and
echoed off the sunlit facades of the Senate and the Direc-
torate, rattled and hissed over the continuous, soft, vast
murmur of the crowd itself.

There were more people standing here in the Square
than lived in all Abbenay, Shevek thought, but the thought
was meaningless, an attempt to quantify direct experience.
He stood with Maedda and the others on the steps of the
Directorate, in front of the columns and the tall bronze
doors, and looked out over the tremulous, somber field of
240

faces, and listened as they listened to the speakers: not
hearing and understanding in the sense in which the indi-
vidual rational mind perceives and understands, but rather
as one looks at, listens to one's own thoughts, or as a
thought perceives and understands the self. When he spoke,
speaking was little different from listening. No conscious
will of his own moved him, no self-consciousness was in
him. The multiple echoes of his voice from distant loud-
speakers and the stone fronts of the massive buildings,
however, distracted him a little, making him hesitate at
times and speak very slowly. But he never hesitated for
words. He spoke their mind, their being, in their language,
though he said no more than he had said out of his own
isolation, out of the center of his own being, a long time
ago.

"It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love.
Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when
forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are
brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which
each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope,
we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have
had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but
from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not
reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is
empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing.
You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you
are, and what you give.

"I am here because you see in me the promise, the
promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city
—the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have
nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but
your own freedom. We have no law but the single princi-
ple of mutual aid between individuals. We have no govern-
ment but the single principle of free association. We have
no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs,
no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages,
no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have
much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not pros-
perous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it
is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell
you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must
come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the
world, into his future, without any past, without any prop-
241

erty, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You
cannot take what you have not given, and you must give
yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot
make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It
is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

As he finished speaking the clattering racket of police
helicopters drawing near began to drown out his voice.

He stood back from the microphones and looked up-
ward, squinting into the sun. As many of the crowd did so
the movement of their heads and hands was like the pas-
sage of wind over a sunlit field of gram.

The noise of the rotating vanes of the machines in the
huge stone box of Capitol Square was intolerable, a clack-
ing and yapping like the voice of a monstrous robot. It
drowned out the chatter of the machine guns fired from
the helicopters. Even as the crowd noise rose up in tumult
the clack of the helicopters was still audible through it,
the mindless yell of weaponry, the meaningless word.

The helicopter fire centered on the people who stood on
or nearest the steps of the Directorate. The columned
portico of the building offered immediate refuge to those
on the steps, and within moments ft was jammed solid.
The noise of the crowd, as people pressed in panic toward
the eight streets that led out of Capitol Square, rose up into
a wailing like a great wind. The helicopters were close
overhead, but there was no telling whether they had
ceased firing or were still firing; the dead and wounded ia
the crowd were too close pressed to fall.

The bronze-sheathed doors of the Directorate gave with
a crash that no one heard. People pressed and trampled to-
ward them to get to shelter, out from under the metal
rain. They pushed by hundreds into the high halls of mar-
ble, some cowering down to hide in the first refuge they
saw, others pushing on to find a way through the building
and out the back, others staying to wreck what they could
until the soldiers came. When they came, marching in their
neat black coats up the steps among dead and dying men
and women, they found on the high, grey, polished wall of
the great foyer a word written at the height of a man's
eyes, in broad smears of blood: DOWN

They shot the dead man who lay nearest the word, and
later on when the Directorate was restored to order the
242

i I

! •

: ;

: ;.

1 »

word was washed off the wall with water, soap, and rags
but it remained; it had been spoken; it bad meaning.

He realized it was impossible to go any farther with his'
companion, who was getting weak, beginning to stumble.
There was nowhere to go, except away from Capitol
Square. There was nowhere to stop, either. The crowd had
twice rallied in Mesee Boulevard, trying to present a front
to the police, but the army's armored cars came behind
the police and drove the people forward, towards Old
Town. The blackcoats had not fired either time, though the
noise of guns could be heard oo other streets. The clacking
helicopters cruised up and down above the streets; one
could not get out from under them.

His companion was breathing in sobs, gulping for air ad
he struggled along. Shevek had been half-carrying him
for several blocks, and they were now far behind the main
mass of the crowd. There was no use trying to catch up.
"Here, sit down here," he told the man, and helped him tw
sit down on the top step of a basement entry to some kind
of warehouse, across the shuttered windows of which the.
word STRIKE was chalked in huge letters. He went down
to the basement door and tried it; it was locked. All doors
were locked. Property was private. He took a piece of
paving stone that had come loose from a corner of the
steps and smashed the hasp and padlock off the door>
working neither furtively nor vindictively, but with the as-
surance of one unlocking his own front door. He looked in.
The basement was full of crates and empty of people. He
helped his companion down the steps, shut the door be-
hind them, and said, "Sit here, lie down if you want. I'll
see if there's water."

The place, evidently a chemical warehouse, had a row
of washtubs as well as a hose system for fires, Shevek's
companion had fainted by the time he got back to him*
He took the opportunity to wash the man's hand with a;

trickle from the hose and to get a look at his wound. It
was worse than he had thought. More then one bullet
must have struck it, tearing two fingers off and mangling
the palm and wrist. Shards of splintered bone stuck out
like toothpicks. The man had been standing near Shevek
and Maedda when the helicopters began firing and, hit,
had lurched against Shevek, grabbing at him for support.
243

Shevek had kept an arm around him all through the
escape through the Directorate; two could keep afoot better"
than one in the first wild press.

He did what he could to stop the bleeding with a
tourniquet and to bandage, or at least cover, the destroyed
hand, and he got the man to drink some water. He did
not know his name; by his white armband he was a
Socialist Worker; he looked to be about Shevek's age»
forty, or a little older.

At the mills in Southwest Shevek had seen men hurt
much worse than this in accidents and had learned that
people may endure and survive incredibly much in the
way of gross injury and pain. But there they had been
looked after. There had been a surgeon to amputate^
plasma to compensate blood loss, a bed to lie down in.

He sat down on the floor beside the man, who now lay
semiconscious in shock, and looked around at the stacks of
crates, the long dark afleys between them, the whitish
gleam of daylight from the barred window slits along the
front wall, the white streaks of saltpeter on the ceiling,
the tracks of workmen's boots and dolly wheels on the
dusty cement floor. One hour hundreds of thousands of
people singing under the open sky; the next hour two men
hiding in a basement.

"You are contemptible," Shevek said in Pravic to his
companion. "You cannot keep doors open. You will never
be free." He felt the man's forehead gently; it was cold
and sweaty. He loosened the tourniquet for a while, then
got up, crossed the murky basement to the door, and went
up onto the street. The fleet of armored cars had passed.
A very few stragglers of the demonstration went by, hur-
rying, their heads down, in enemy territory. Shevek tried
to stop two; a third finally halted for him. "I need a doctor,
there is a man hurt. Can you send a doctor back here?"

"Better get him out."

"Help me carry him."

The man hurried on. "They coming through here," he
called back over his shoulder. "You better get out."

No one else came by, and presently Shevek saw a line
of blackcoats far down the street He went back down
into the basement, shut the door, returned to the wounded
man's side, sat down on the dusty floor. "Hell," he said.
244

After a while he took the little notebook out of his shirt
pocket and began to study it.

In the afternoon, when he cautiously looked outside,
he saw an armored car stationed across the street and
two others slewed across the street at the crossing. That
explained the shouts he had been hearing: it would be
soldiers giving orders to each other.

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed,
how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how
the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants
orders, how the captains ... and so on and so on up to the
generals, who could give everyone else orders and need
take them from none, except the commander in chief.
Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust "You call
that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it dis-
cipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of
extraordinary inefficiency—a kind of seventh-millennium
steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure
what could be done that was worth doing?" This had
given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the
breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out
of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced
him to concede the effectiveness of guerillas, organized
from below, self-disciplined, "But that only works when
the people think they're fighting for something of their
own—you know, their homes, or some notion or other,"
the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument
He now continued it, in the darkening basement among
the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to
Atro that he now understood why the army was organized
as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational
form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply
had not understood that the purpose was to enable men
with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women
easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he
Still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness
entered in.

He occasionally spoke to his companion, too, as it got
darker. The man was lying now with his eyes open, and
he moaned a couple of times in a way that touched Shevek,
a childish, patient sort of moan. He had made a gallant
effort to keep up and keep going, all the time they were
in the first panic of the crowd forcing into and through
245

the Directorate, and running, and then walking towards
Old Town; he had held the hurt hand under his coat,
pressed against his side, and had done his best to keep
going and not to hold Shevek back. The second time he
moaned, Shevek took his good hand and whispered.
•"Don't, don't. Be quiet, brother," only because he could
Dot bear to hear the man's pain and not be able to do
anything for him. The man probably thought he meant
he should be quiet lest he give them away to the police,
for he nodded weakly and shut his Ups together.

The two of them endured there three nights. During all
that time there was sporadic fighting in the warehouse
district, and the army blockade remained across that block
of Mesee Boulevard. The fighting never came very close
to it, and it was strongly manned, so the men in (hiding
had no chance to get out without surrendering themselves.
Once when his companion was awake Shevek asked him,
"'If we went out to the police what would they do with
us?"

The man smiled and whispered, "Shoot us."

As there had been scattered gunfire around, near and
far, for hours, and an occasional solid explosion, and the
clacking of the helicopters, his opinion seemed well
founded. The reason for his smile was less clear.

He died of loss of blood that night, while they lay side
by side for warmth on the mattress Shevek had made
from packing-crate straw. He was already stiff when
Shevek woke, and sat up, and listened to the silence in the
great dark basement and outside on the street and in all
the city, a silence of death.

246

Chapter 10




Rail lines in Southwest ran for the most part on embank-
ments a meter or more above the plain. There was less
dust drift on an elevated roadbed, and it gave travelers a
good view of desolation.

Southwest was the only one of the eight Divisions of
Anarres that lacked any major body of water. Marshes
were formed by polar melt in summer in the far south;

towards the equator there were only shallow alkaline lakes
in vast salt pans. There were no mountains; every hun-
dred kilometers or so a chain of hills ran north-south,
barren, cracked, weathered into cliffs and pinnacles,
They were streaked with violet and red, and on cliff faces
the rockmoss, a plant that lived in any extreme of heat,
cold, aridity, and wind, grew in bold verticals of grey-
green, making a plaid with the striations of the sandstone.
There was no other color in the landscape but dun, fading
to whitish where salt pans lay half covered with sand. Rare
thunderclouds moved over the plains, vivid white in the
purplish sky. They cast no rain, only shadows. The
embankment and the glittering rails ran straight behind
the truck train to the end of sight and straight before
it to the end of sight.

247

Nothing you can do with Southwest," said the driver,
"but get across it."

His companion did not answer, having fallen asleep. His
head jiggled to the vibration of the engine. His hands,
work-hard and blackened by frostbite, lay loose on his
thighs; his face in relaxation was lined and sad. He had
hitched the ride in Copper Mountain, and since there
were no other passengers the driver had asked him to
ride in the cab for company. He had gone to sleep at once.
The driver glanced at him from time to time with disap-
pointment but sympathy. He had seen so many worn-out
people in the last years that it seemed the normal condi-
tion to him.

Late in the long afternoon the man woke up, and after
staring out at the desert a while be asked, "You always
do this run alone?"

"Last three, four years."
"Ever break down out here?"

"Couple of times. Plenty of rations and water in the
locker. You hungry, by the way?"
"Not yet."

"They send down the breakdown rig from Lonesome
within a day or so."

*That'& the next settlement?"

"Right Seventeen hundred kilometers from Sedep
Mines to Lonesome. Longest run between towns on
Anarres. I've been doing it for eleven years."
"Not tired of it?"
"No. Like to run a Job by myself."
The passenger nodded agreement.
"And it's steady. I like routine; you can think. Fifteen
days on the run, fifteen off with the partner in New Hope.
Year in, year out; drought, famine, whatever. Nothing
changes, it's always drought down here. I like the run. Get
the water out, will you? Cooler's back underneath the
locker."

They each had a long swig from the bottle. The water
had a flat, alkaline taste, but was cool. "Ah, that's goodi"
the passenger said gratefully. He put the bottle away
and, returning to his seat in the front of the cab, stretched,
bracing his hands against the roof. "You're a partnered
man, then," he said. There was a simplicity in the way
248

he said it that the driver liked, and he answered, "Eighteen
years."

"Just starting."

**By damn, I agree with that! Now that's what some
doa't see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around
enough in your teens, thafs when you get the most out
of it, and- also you find out that it's all pretty much the
same damn thing. And a good thing, tool But still, what's
different isn't the copulating; it's the other person. And
eighteen years is just a start, all right, when it comes to
figuring out that difference. At least, if it's a woman
you're trying to figure out A woman won't let on to
being so puzzled by a man, but maybe they bluff. . . .-
Anyhow, that's the pleasure of it The puzzles and the
bluffs and the rest of it. The variety. Variety doesnt
come with just moving around. I was all over Anarres,
young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have
known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I
came back here, and I do this run every three decads
year in year out through this same desert where you
cant ten one sandhill from the next and it's all the same
for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and
go home to the same partner—and I never been bored
once. It isnt changing around from place to place that
keeps you lively. It's getting time on your side. Working
with it, not against it"

"That's it." said the passenger.

'•Where's the partner?"

"In Northeast Pour years now."

*That's too long," the driver said. "You should have
been posted together."
"Not where I was.**
"Where's that?"
"Elbow, and then Grand Valley."

**I heard about Grand Valley." He now looked at the
passenger with the respect due a survivor. He saw the
dry look of the man's tanned skin, a kind of weathering
to the bone, which he had seen in others who had come
through the famine years in the Dust "We shouldn't have
tried to keep those mills running."

"Needed the phosphates."

"But they say, when the provisions train was stopped in
Portal, they kept the mills going, and people died of
249

hunger on the Job. Just went a little out of the way and
lay down and died. Was it like that?"

The man nodded. He said nothing. The driver pressed
no further, but said after a while, "I wondered what I'd
do if my train ever got mobbed."

"It never did?"

"No. See, I don't carry foodstuff's; one truckload, at
most, for Upper Sedep. This is an ores run. But if I got
on a provisions run, and they stopped roe, what would
I do? Run *em down and get the food to where it ought
to go? But hell, you going to run down kids, old men?
They're doing wrong but you going to kill em for it? I
don't know!*'

The straight shining rails ran under the wheels. 'Clouds
in the west laid great shivering mirages on the plain, the
shadows of dreams of lakes gone dry ten million years
ago.

"A syndic, fellow Fve known for years, he did just
that, north of here, in '66. They tried to take a grain truck
off. his train. He backed the train, killed a couple of them
before they cleared the track, they were like worms in
rotten fish, thick, he said. He said, there's eight hundred
people waiting for that grain truck, and how many of
them might die if they don't get it? More than a couple,
a lot more. So it looks like he was right But by damni I
can't add up figures like that I don't know if ifs right to
count people like you count numbers. But then, what do
you do? Which ones do you kfll?"

*The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister,
the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in
the plant got rufl rations—just barely enough for that kind
of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations.
K they were sick or too weak to work, they got half.
On half rations you couldnt get well. You couldn't get
back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to
put people on half rations, people that were already sick.
I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk
work, so I got full rations: I earned them, I earned them
by making lists of who should starve." The man's light
eyes looked ahead into the dry light. "Like you said, I was
to count people."

"You quit?"

'*Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else
250

took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There's always
somebody willing to make lists."

"Now that's wrong," the driver said, scowling into the
glare. He had a bald brown face and scalp, no hair left
between cheeks and occiput, though he wasn't past his
middle forties. It was a strong, hard, and innocent face.
"That's dead wrong. They should have shut the mills down.
You can't ask a man to do that. Arent we Odonians? A
man can lose kis temper, all right That's what the people
who mobbed trains did. They were hungry, the kids were
hungry, been hungry too long, there's food coming through
and its not for you. you lose your temper and go for it.
Same thing with the friend, those people were taking
apart the train he was in charge of, lie lost his temper and
put it in reverse. He didn't count any noses. Not then!
Later, maybe. Because he was sick when he saw what
he'd done. But what they had you doing, saying this one
lives and that one dies—that's not a Job a person has a
right to do, or ask anybody else to do."

"It's been a bad time, brother," the passenger said
gently, watching the glaring plain where the shadows of
water wavered and drifted with the wind.

The old cargo dirigible wallowed over the mountains
and moored in at the airport on Kidney Mountain. Three
passengers got off there. Just as the last of them touched
ground, the ground picked itself up and bucked. ''Earth-
quake," he remarked; he was a local coming home.
**Damn, look at that dustt Someday we'n come down here
and there wont be any mountain."

Two of the passengers chose to wait till the trucks were
loaded and ride with them. Shevek chose to walk, since
the local said that Chakar was only about six kilometers
down the mountain.

The road went in a series of long curves with a short rise
at the end of each. The rising slopes to the left of the road
and the falling slopes to tke right were thick with scrub
holum; Hues of tall tree holum, spaced Just as if they had
been planted, followed veins of ground water along the
mountainsides. At the crest of a rise Shevek saw the clear
gold of sunset above the dark and many-folded hills.
There was no sign of mankind here except the road itself,
going down into shadow. As he started down, the air grum-
251

bled a little and he felt a strangeness: no yHt, no tremor,
but a displacement, a conviction that things were wrong.
He completed the step he had been making, and the
ground was there to meet his foot He went on; the road
'stayed lying down. He had been in no danger, but he had
never in any danger known himself ao close to death.
Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncer-
tain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise
made by the human mind. Shevek felt the cold, clean air
In his mouth and lungs. He listened. Remote, a mountain
torrent thundered somewhere down in the shadows.

He came in the late dusk to Chakar. The sky was dark
violet over the black ridges. Street lamps flared bright and
lonely. Housefronts looked sketchy in the artificial' light,
the wilderness dark behind them. There were many empty
lots, many single houses: an old town, a frontier town,
isolated, scattered. A woman passing directed Shevek to
Domicile Eight: 'That way, brother, past the hospital, the
end of the street." The street ran into the dark under the
mountainside and ended at the door of a low building. He
entered and found a country-town domicile foyer that took
him back to his childhood, to the places in Liberty, Drum
Mountain. Wide Plains, where he and his father had lived:

the dim light, the patched matting; a leaflet describing a
local machinists training group, a notice of syndicate
meetings, and a flyer for a performance of a play three
decads ago, tacked to the announcement board; a framed
amateur painting of Odo in prison over the common-room
sofa; a homemade harmonium; a list of residents and a
notice of hot-water hours at the town baths posted by the
door.

Sherut, Takver. No. 3.

He knocked, watching the reflection of the haQ light m
the dark surface of the door, which did not hang quite
true in its frame. A woman said, "Come int" He opened
the door.

The brighter light in the room was behind her. He could
not see well enough for a moment to be sure it was Takver.
She stood facing him. She reached out, as if to push him
away or to take hold of him, an uncertain, unfinished ges-
ture. He took her hand, and men they held each other,
they came together and stood holding each other on the
unreliable earth*

252

"Come in," Takver said, "oh come in, come in."

Shevek opened his eyes. Farther into the room, which
Btui seemed very bright, be saw the serious, watchful face
of a small child.

"Sadik, this is Shevek.'*

The child went to Takver, took hold of her leg, and
burst into tears.

"But don't cry, why are you crying, little soul?"

**Why are you?** the child whispered.

"Because I'm happy! Only because Fro happy. Sit on my
lap. But Shevek, Shevekl The letter from you only came
yesterday. I was going to go by the telephone when I
took Sadik home to sleep. You said you'd call tonight. Not
come tonight! Oh, don't cry. Sadiki, look, I'm not any
more, am I?**

*The man cried too."

**0f course I did."

Sadik looked at him with mistrustful curiosity. She was
four years old. She had a round head, a round face, she
was round, dark, furry, soft.

There was no furniture in the room but the two bed
platforms. Takver had sat down on one with Sadik on her
lap, Shevek sat down on the other and stretched out his
legs. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, and
held the knuckles out to show Sadik. "See," he said,
"they're wet. And the nose dribbles. Do you keep a hand-
kerchief?"

"Yes. Don't you?"

"I did, but it got lost in a washhouse.**

"You can share the handkerchief I use," Sadik said af-
ter a pause.

"He doesnt know where it is," said Takver.

Sadik got off her mother's lap and fetched a handker-
chief from a drawer in the closet. She gave it to Takver,
who passed it across to Shevek. "It's clean,'* Takver said,
with her large smile. Sadik watched closely while Sbevek
wiped his nose.

"Was there an earthquake here a little while ago?" he
asked.

"It shakes all the time, you really stop noticing," Takver
said, but Sadik, delighted to dispense information, said in
her high but husky voice, "Yes, there was a big one before
dinner. When there's an earthquake the windows go gliggle
253

and the floor waves, and you ought to go into the door-
way or outside."

Shevek looked at Takver; she returned the look. She had
aged more than four years. She had never had very good
teeth, and now had lost two, just back of the upper eye-
teeth, so that the gaps showed when she souled. Her skin
no longer had the fine taut surface of youth, and her hair,
pulled back neatly, was dull.

Shevek saw clearly that Takver had lost her young
grace, and looked a plain, tired woman near the middle
of her life. He saw this more clearly than anyone else
could have seen it He saw everything about Takver in a
way that no one else could have seen it, from the stand-
point of years of intimacy and years of longing. He saw her
as she was.

Their eyes met

"How—how's it been going here?" he asked, reddening
all at once and obviously speaking at random. She felt the
palpable wave, the outrush of his desire. She also flushed
slightly, and smiled. She said in her husky voice, "Oh, same
as when we talked on the phone."

"That was six decads ago!"

"Things go along pretty much the same here.

"It's very beautiful here—the hills." He saw in Takver's
eyes the darkness of the mountain valleys. The acuteness
of his sexual desire grew abruptly, so that he was dizzy
for a moment, then he got over the crisis temporarily and
tried to command his erection to subside. "Do you think
youll want to stay here?" he said.

"I dont care," she said, in her strange, dark, husky
voice,

"Your nose is stiH dribbling," Sadik remarked, keenly,
but without emotional bias.

"Be glad that's all," Shevek said. Takver said, "Hush,
Sadik, dont egoizel" Both the adults laughed. Sadik con-
tinued to study Shevek.

"I do like the town, Shev. The people are nice—all
characters. But the work isn't much. It's just lab work in
the hospital. The shortage of technicians is just about
over, I could leave soon without leaving them in the
lurch. I'd like to go back to Abbenay, if you were thinking
of that Have you got a repeating?"
254

"Didn't ask for one and haven't checked. I've been on
the road for a decad."

"What were you doing on the road?"
traveling on it, Sadik."

*'He was coming from half across the world, from the
south, from the deserts, to come to us," Takver said. The
child smiled, settled herself more comfortably on her lap,
and yawned.

"Have you eaten, Shev? Are you worn out? I must get
this child to bed, we were just thinking of leaving when
you knocked."

"She sleeps in the dormitory already?'*

"Since the beginning of this quarter.'*

"I was four already," Sadik stated.

"You say, I am four already," said Takver, dumping
her off gently in order to get her coat from the closet
Sadik stood up, in profile to Shevek; she was extremely
conscious of him, and directed her remarks towards him.
"But I was four, now I'm more than four."

"A temporali&t, like the fatheri"

''You can't be four and more than four at the same
time, can you?" the child asked, sensing approbation, and
now speaking directly to Shevek.

"Oh, yes, easily. And you can be four and nearly five at
the same time, too." Sitting on the low platform, he could
hold his head on a level with the child's so that she did not
have to look up at him. "But I'd forgotten that you were
nearly five, you see. When I last saw you you were hardly
more than nothing."

"Really?" Her tone was indubitably flirtatious.

"Yes. You were about so long." He held his hands not
very far apart.

"Could I talk yet?"

"You said waa, and a few other things."

**Did I wake up everybody in the dom like Cheben^a
baby?" she inquired, with a broad, gleeful smile.

"Of course."

"When did I leam how to really talk?"

"At about one half year old," said Takver, "and you
have never shut up since. Where's the hat. Sadikiki?"      |

"At school. I hate the hat I wear," she informfid|
Shevek.                                             ]

They walked the child through the windy streets to the \
255                          ]

learning-center dormitory and toofc her into the lobby. It
was a little, shabby place too, but brightened by children's
paintings, several fine brass model engines, and a litter of
toy houses and painted wooden people. Sadik kissed her
mother good night, then turned to Shevek and put up her
arms; he stooped to her; she kissed him matter-of-factly
but firmly, and said, "Good night!" She went off with the
night attendant, yawning. They heard her voice, the at-
tendant's mild hushing.

"She's beautiful, Takver. Beautiful, intelligent, sturdy.**

"She's spoiled, I'm afraid."

**No, no. You've done well, fantastically well—in such a
time—'*

"It hasn't been so bad here, not the way it was'in the
south,'* she said, looking up into his face as they left the
dormitory. "Children were fed, here. Not very well, but
enough. A community here can grow food. If nothing else
there's the scrub holum. You can gather wild holum seeds
and pound them for meal. Nobody starved here. But I did
spoil Sadik. I nursed her till she was three, of course, why
not when there was nothing good to wean her to! But they
disapproved, at the research station at Rolny. They wanted
me to put her in the nursery there full time. They said I
was being propertarian about the child and not contribut-
ing full strength to the social effort in the crisis. They
were right, really. But they were so righteous. None of
them understood about being lonely. They were all group-
ers. no characters. It was the women who nagged me
about nursing. Real body profiteers. I stuck it out there
because the food was good—trying out the algaes to see if
they were palatable, sometimes you got quite a lot over
standard rations, even if it did taste like glue—until they
could replace me with somebody who fitted in better. Then
I went to Fresh Start for about ten decads. That was win-
ter, two years ago, that long time the mail didn't get
through, when things were so bad where you were. At
Fresh Start I saw this posting listed, and came here. Sadik
stayed with me in the dom till this autumn. I still miss her.
The room's so silent.**

"Isn't there a roommate?"

**Sherut, she's very nice, but she works night shift at the
hospital. It was time Sadik went, it's good for her living
with the other children. She was getting shy. She was very
256

good about going there, very stoical. Little children are
stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big
things as they come, they don't whine like so many adults."

They walked along aide by side. The autumn stars had
come out, incredible in number and brilliance, twinkling
and almost blinking because of the dust stirred up by the
earthquake and the wind, so that the whole sky seemed
to tremble, a shaking of diamond chips, a scintillation of
sunlight on a black sea. Under that uneasy splendor the
hills were dark and solid, the roofs hard-edged, the light of
the street lamps mild.

"Four yeara ago," Shevek said. *1t was four years ago
that I came back to Abbenay, from that place in South'
rising—what was it called?—Red Springs. It was a night
like this, windy, the stars. I ran, I ran all the way from
Plains Street to the domicile. And you weren't there, you'd
gone. Four years!"

"The moment I left Abbenay I knew I'd been a fool to
go. Famine or no famine. I should have refused the post-
ing."

"It wouldn't have made much difference. Sabid was
waiting to tell me I was through at the Institute.'*

"If Fd been there, you wouldn't have gone down to the
Dust."

"Maybe not, but we mightn't have kept postings togeth-
er. For a while it seemed as if nothing could hold together,
didn't it? The towns in Southwest—there weren't any
children left in them. There still aren't. They sent them
north, into regions where there was local food, or a
chance of it And they stayed to keep the mines and mills
going. It's a wonder we pulled through, all of us, isnt
it? ... But by damn, I will do my own work for a while
nowl"

She took his arm. He stopped short, as if her touch had
electrocuted him on the spot She shook him, smiling. "You
didn't eat, did you?"

"No. Oh Takver, I have been sick for you, sick for youl**

They came together, holding on to each other fiercely,
in the dark street between the lamps, under the stars. They
broke apart as suddenly, and Shevek backed up against
the nearest wafl. "I'd better eat something," he said, and
Takver said, "Yes, or you'll fall flat on your facel Come
on." They went a block to the commons, the largest
257

buHding in Chakar. Regular dinner wa& over, but the
cooks were eating, and provided the traveler a bowl of
stew and all the bread ke wanted. They all sat at the
table nearest the kitchen. The other tables had already
been cleaned and set for next morning. The big room was
cavernous, the ceiling rising into shadow, the far end
obscure except where a bowl or cup winked on a dark
table, catching the light The cooks and servers were a
quiet crew, tired after the day*s work; they ate fast, not
talking much* not paying much attention to Takver and the
stranger. One after another they finished and got up to
take their dishes to the washers in the kitchen. One old
woman said as she got up, "Dont hurry, ammari, they've
got an hour's washing yet to do.*' She had a grim face and
looked dour, not maternal, not benevolent; but she spoke
with compassion, with the charity of equals. She could do
nothing for them but say, ^TDon't hurry," and look at them
for a moment with the look of brotherly love.

They could do no more for her, and little more for each
other.

They went back to Domicile Eight, Room 3, and there
their long desire was fulfilled. They did not even light the
lamp; they both liked making love in darkness. The first
time they both came as Shevek came into her, the second
time they struggled and cried out in a rage of joy, prolong-
ing their climax as if delaying the moment of death, the
third time they were both half asleep, and circled about
the center of infinite pleasure, about each other's being,
like planets circling blindly, quietly, in the flood of
sunlight, about the common center of gravity, swinging,
circling endlessly.

Takver woke at dawn. She leaned on her elbow and
looked across Shevek at the grey square of the window,
and then at him. He lay on his back, breathing so quietly
that his chest scarcely moved, his face thrown back a little,
remote and stem in me thin light We came, Takver
thought, from a great distance to each other. We have
always done so. Over great distances, over years, over
abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far
away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances,
no years, can be greater than the distance that's already
between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our
being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge
258

with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing
in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how
far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he
comes back, he comes back....

Takver put in notice of departure at the hospital in
Chakar, but stayed till they could replace her in the
laboratory. She worked her eight-hour shift—in the third
quarter of the year 168 many people were still on the
long work shifts of emergency postings, for though the
drought had broken in the winter of 167, the economy
had by no means returned to normal yet. "Long post and
short commons" was still the rule for people in skilled
work, but the food was now adequate to the day's work,
which had not been true a year ago and two years ago.

Shevek did not do much of anything for a while. He did
not consider himself ill; after the four years of famine
everyone was so used to the effects of hardship and mal-
nutrition that they took them as the norm. He had the
dust cough that was endemic in southern desert communi-
ties, a chronic irritation of the bronchia similar to silico-
sis and other miners' diseases, but this was also something
one took for granted where he had been living. He simply
enjoyed the fact that if he felt like doing nothing, there
was nothing he had to do.

For a few days he and Sherut shared the room day-
times, both of them sleeping till late afternoon; then She-
rut, a placid woman of forty, moved in with another
woman who worked night shift, and Shevek and Takver
had the room to themselves for the four decads they stayed
on in Chakar. While Takver was at work he slept, or
walked out in the fields or on the dry, bare hills above
the town. He went by the learning center late in the after-
noon and watched Sadik and the other children on the
playgrounds, or got involved, as adults often did, in one
of the children's projects—a group of mad seven-year-old
carpenters, or a pair of sober twelve-year-old' surveyors
having trouble with triangulation. Then he walked with
Sadik to the room; they met Takver as she got off work
and went to the baths together and to commons. An
hour or two after dinner he and Takver took the child
back to her dormitory and returned to the room. The days
were utterly peaceful, in the autumn sunlight, in the si-
259

lence of the hills. It was to Shevek a time outside time, be-
side the flow, unreal, enduring, enchanted. He and Takver
sometimes talked very late; other nights they went to bed
not Ions after dark and slept nine hours, ten hours, in the
profound, crystalline silence of the mountain night.

He had come with luggage: a tattered little fiber-board
case, his name printed large on it in black ink; all Anar-
resti carried papers, keepsakes, the spare pair of boots, in
the same kind of case when they .traveled, orange fiber-
board, well scratched and dented. His contained a new
Shirt he had picked up as he came through Abbenay, a
couple of books and some papers, and a curious object,
which as it lay in the case appeared to consist of a series of
flat loops of wire and a few glass beads. He revealed
this, with some mystery, to Sadik, his second evening
there.

"It's a necklace," the child said with awe. People in the
small towns wore a good deal of jewelry. In sophisticated
Abbenay there was more sense of the tension between the
principle of nonownership and the impulse to self-adorn-
ment, and there a ring or pin was the limit of good taste.
But elsewhere the deep connection between the aesthetic
and the acquisitive was simply not worried about; people
bedecked themselves unabashedly. Most districts had a
professional jeweler who did his work for love and fame,
as well as the craft shops, where you could make to suit
your own taste with the modest materials offered—copper,
silver, beads, spinels, and the garnets and yellow diamonds
of Southrising. Sadik had not seen many bright, delicate
things, but she knew necklaces, and so identified it.

"No: look," her father said, and with solemnity and
deftnesa raised the object by the thread that connected
its several loops. Hanging from his hand it came alive, the
loops turning freely, describing airy spheres one within
the other, the glass beads catching the lamplight.

"Oh, beauty!" the child said. '•What is it?"

It hangs from the ceiling; is there a nail? The coat
hook will do, till I can get a nail from Supplies. Do you
know who made it, Sadik?"

^o— You did."

"She did. The mother. She did." He turned to Takver.
"It's my favorite, the one that was over the desk. I gave
the others to Bedap. I wasn't going to leave them there
260

-

for old what's-her-name. Mother Envy down the corridor."

"Oh—Bunub! I hadn't thought of her in years'" Takver
laughed shakily. She looked at the mobile as if she was
afraid of it.

Sadik stood watching it as it fumed silently seeking its
balance. "I wish," she said at last, carefully, "that I could
share it one night over the bed I sleep in in the dormitory."

"I'll make one for you, dear souL For every night."

"Can you really make them, Takver?"

"Well, I used to. I think I could make you one." The
tears were now plain in Takver*s eyes. Shevek put his arms
around her. They were both still on edge, overstrained.
Sadik looked at them holding each other for a moment
with a calm, observing eye, then returned to watching
the Occupation of Uninhabited Space-
When they were alone, evenings, Sadik was often the
subject of their talk. Takver was somewhat overabsorbed
in the child, for want of other intimacies, and her
strong common sense was obscured by maternal ambitions
and anxieties. This was not natural to her; neither com-
petitiveness nor protectiveness was a strong motive in
Anarresti life. She was glad to talk her worries out and
get rid of them, which Shevek's presence enabled her to
do. The first nights, she did most of the talking, and he
listened as be might have listened to music or to running
water, without trying to reply. He had not talked very
much, for four years now; he was out of the habit of con-
versation. She released him from that silence, as she had
always done. Later, it was he who talked the most, though
always dependent on her response.

"Do you remember Tirin?" he asked one night. It was
cold; winter had arrived, and the room, the farthest from
the domicile furnace, never got very warm, even with the
register wide open. They had taken the bedding from both
platforms and were well cocooned together on the plat-
form nearer the register. Shevek was wearing a very old,
much-washed shirt to keep his chest warm, as he liked to
sit up in bed. Takver, wearing nothing, was under the
blankets from the ears down. "What became of the orange
blanket?" she said.

"What a propertarian! I left it"

"To Mother Envy? How sad. I'm not a propertarian. I'm
Just sentimental. It was the first blanket we slept under."
261

**No, it wasnt We must have used a blanket up b the
Ne Theraa."

"If we did, I don't remember it" Takver laughed. "Who
did you ask about?"

"Tirin."

"Dont remember.*

"At Northsetting Regional. Dark boy, snub nose—w

"Oh, Tirint Of course. I was thinking of Abbenay."

**I saw tun, in Southwest."

"You saw Tirin? How was he?"

Shevek said nothing for a while, tracing out the weave
erf the blanket with one finger. "Remember what Bedap
told us about him?"

"That he kept getting kleggich postings, and moving
around, and finally went to Segvina Island, didn't he? And
•then Dap lost track of him."

"Did you see the play he put on, the one that made
trouble for him?"

"At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I
dont remember it, that's so long ago now. It was silly.
Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti,
that's right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics
tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw,
and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so
he gets himself smuggled onto Anan-es. And then he runs
around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell
things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he's holding
so many he can't move. So he has to sit where he is, and
he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anar-
res. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and
this woman want to copulate, and she's just wide open
and ready, but he can't do it until he's given her his
gold nuggete first, to pay her. And she didn't want them.
That waa funny, with her flopping down and waving her
legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he'd
leap up like he'd been bitten, saying, 'I must not! It is not
moral! It is not good businessr Poor TirinI He was so
funny, and so alive.**

"He played the Urrasti?"

"Yes. He was marvelous.'*

"He showed me the play. Several times."

"Where did you meet him? In Grand Valley?"        j

"No, before, in Elbow. He was janitor for the mill.'*
262

"Had he chosen that?**

"I don't think Tir was able to choose at all, by then...,
Bedap always thought that he was forced to go to Segvina,
that he was bullied into asking for therapy. I don't know.
When I saw him, several years after therapy, he was a
destroyed person."

"You think they did something at Segvina—?"

"I don't know; I think the Asylum does try to offer
shelter, a refuge. To judge from their syndical publica-
tions, they're at least altruistic. I doubt that they drove Tir
over the edge."

"But what did break him, then? Just not finding a post-
ing he wanted?"

"The play broke him."

'The play? The fuss those old turds made about it? Oh,
but listen, to be driven crazy by that kind of moralistic
scolding you'd have to be crazy already. All be had to do
was ignore it!"

"Tir was crazy already. By our society's standards."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I think Tir's a bom artist. Not a craftsman—a
creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who's got to turn
everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man
who praises through rage."

"Was the play that good?" Takver asked naTvely, coming
out an inch or two from the blankets and studying Shevek's
profile.

"No, I don't think so. It must have been funny on stage.
He was only twenty when he wrote it, after all. He keeps
writing it over. He's never written anything else."

"He keeps writing the same play?"

"He keeps writing the same play."

"Ugh," Takver said with pity and disgust

"Every couple of decads he'd come and show it to me.
And I'd read it or make a show of reading it and try to
talk with him about it He wanted desperately to talk about
it, but he couldn't. He was too frightened."

"Of what? I don't understand."

"Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the hu-
man race, the brotherhood that rejected him. When a
man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well
be frightened."

"You mean, just because some people called his play im-
263

moral and said he shouldn't get a teaching posting, he
decided everybody was against him? That's a bit sillyl"

"But who was for him?"

"Dap was—all his friends."

"But he lost them. He got posted away."

^'Why didn't he refuse the posting, then?"

"Listen, Takver. I thought the aame thing, exactly. We
always say that You said it—you should have refused to

Jo to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I'm a
ree man, I didn't have to come here!... We always think
it, and say it, but we don't do it We keep our initiative
tucked away safe in our mind, fike a room where we can
come and say, 1 don't have to do anything, I make my
own choices, I'm free.* And then we leave the little room
in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay till
we're reposted."

"Oh, Shev, that's not true. Onty since the drought
Before that there wasn't half so much posting. People
just worked up jobs where they wanted them, and joined
a syndicate or formed one, and then registered with Div-
lab. Divlab mostly posted people who preferred to be in
General Labor Pool. It's going to go back to that again,
now."

"I don't know. It ought to, of course. But even before
the famine it wasnt going in that direction, but away from
It Bedap was right: every emergency, every labor draft
even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic
machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this ia the
way it was done, this is the way it is done, this is the
way it has to be done.... There was a lot of that, before
the drought Five years of stringent control may have fixed
the pattern permanently. Don't look so skepticall Lis-
ten, you tell me, how many people do you know who re-
fused to accept a posting—even before the famine?"

Takver considered the question. "Leaving out nuchniU?**

"No, no. Nuchnibi are important."

"Well, several of Dap's friends—that nice composer,
Salas, and some of the scruffy ones too. And real nuctmibi
used to come through Round Valley when I was a kid.
Only they cheated, I always thought They told such lovely
lies and stories, and told fortunes, everybody was glad to
see them and keep them and feed them as long as they'd
{stay. But they never would stay long. But then people
264

would Just pick up and leave town, kids usually, some of
them just hated farm work. and they'd just quit their
posting and leave. People do that everywhere, all the time.
They move on, looking for something better. You just
don't call it refusing postingi"

•*Why not?"

"What are you getting at?" Takver grumbled, retiring
further under the blanket.

"Well, this. That we're ashamed to say we've refused
a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates
the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance
with it. We don't cooperate—we obey. We fear being out-
cast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our
neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom
of choice. You don't believe me, Tak, but try, just try
stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how
you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he's a
wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminall We have created
crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man out-
side the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him
for it We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior,
built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, be-
cause they're part of our thinking. Tir never did that I
knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he
never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a
natural Odonian—a real one! He was a free man, and the
rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for
•his first free act."

"I don't think," Takver said, muffled in the bed, and de-
fensively, "that Tir was a very strong person."

*'No, he was extremely vulnerable."

There was a long silence.

"No wonder he haunts you," she said. "His play. Your
book."

"But rm luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work
isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist
can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere."

Takver watched him from the comer of her eye for
some time, then turned over and sat up, pulling the blanket
up around her shoulders. "Brr! It's cold. ... I was wrong.
wasn't I, about the book. About letting Sabiri cut it up and
put his name on it. It seemed right It seemed like setting
the work before the workman, pride before vanity, com-
265

munity before ego, all that. But it wasn't really that at
all, was it? It was a capitulation. A surrender to SabuTs
authoritarianism."

"I don't know. It did get the thing printed."
'The right end, but the wrong meansi I thought about
ft for a long time, at Rolny, Shev. Ill tell you what was
wrong. I was pregnant. Pregnant women have no ethics.
Only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse. To hell
with the book, and the partnership, and the truth, if they
threaten the precious fetus! It's a racial preservation drive,
but it can work right against community; it's biological,
not social. A man can be grateful he never gets into the
grip of it. But he'd better realize than a woman can, and
watch out for it. I think that's why the old archisms used
women as property. Why did the women let them? Be-
cause they were pregnant all the time—because they were
already possessed, enslaved!"

"All right, maybe, but our society, here, is a true
community wherever it truly embodies Odo's ideas. It was
a woman who made the Promise! What are you doing—
indulging guilt feelings? Wallowing?" The word he used
was not "wallowing," there being no animals on Anarres to
make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally
"coating continually and thickly with excrement." The
flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation
of vndd metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.

"Well, no. It was lovely, having Sadiki But I was wrong
about the book."

"We were both wrong. We always go wrong together.
You don't really think you made up my mind for me?"

"In that case I think I did."

"No. The fact is, neither of us made up our mind.
Neither of us chose. We let Sabul choose for us. Our own,
internalized Sabul—convention, moralism, fear of social
ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being freel Well,
never again. I learn slowly, but I learn."

"What are you going to do?" asked Takver, a thrill of
agreeable excitement in her voice.

"Go to Abbenay with you and start a syndicate, a print-
ing syndicate. Print the Principles, uncut And whatever
else we like. Bedap's Sketch of Open Education in
Science, that the PDC wouldn't circulate. And Tirin's play.
I owe him that He taught me what prisons are, and who
266

builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
Fin going to go fulfill my proper function in the social
organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls."

"It may get pretty drafty," Takver said, huddled in
blankets. She leaned against bim, and he put his arm
around her shoulders. "I expect it will," he said.

Long after Takver had faDen asleep that night Shevek
lay awake, his hands under his head, looking into darkness.
hearing silence. He thought of his long trip out of the
Dust, remembering the levels and mirages of the desert,
the train driver with the bald, brown head and candid
eyes, wto had said that one must work with time and not
against it

Shevek had learned something about his own will these
last four years. In its frustration he had learned its
strength. No social or ethical imperative equaled it. Not
even hunger could repress it The less he had, the more
absolute became his need to be.

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his
"cellular function,** the analogic term for the individual's
individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best
contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him
exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination
of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength.
That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the
Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal
did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; ;ust the
contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the
real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual
became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individ-
ual, but never compromise: for though only the society
could give security and stability, only the individual, the
person, had the power of moral choice—the power of
change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society
was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution
begins in the thinking mind.

All this Shevek had thought out, in these terms, for his
conscience was a completely Odonian one.

He was therefore certain, by now, that his radical and
unqualified wSl to create was, in Odonian terms, its own
Justification- His sense of primary responsibility towards
his work did not cut him off from his fellows, from his
267

society, as he had thought It engaged him with them
absolutely.

He also felt that a man who had this sense of responsi-
bility about one thing was obliged to carry it through in
all things. It was a mistake to see himself as its vehicle
and nothing else, to sacrifice any other obligation to it

That sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of
recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she had
spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because
she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and
ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was
no end. There was process: process was all. You could
go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you
did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping any-
where. All responsibilities, all commitments thus under-
stood took on substance and duration.

So his mutual commitment with Takver, their relation-
ship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four
years' separation. They had both suffered from it, and
suffered a good deal, but it had not occurred to either
of them to escape the suffering by denying the commit-
ment.

For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of
Takver's sleep, it was joy they were both after—the com-
pleteness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade
the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but
you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to
come borne.

Takver sighed softly in her sleep, as if agreeing with
him, and turned over, .pursuing some quiet dream.

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The
search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The
variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sex-
ually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has
an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not
a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a
cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in
which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the
fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity:

a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the
past and the future that it is a human act Loyalty, which
268

asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time
into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no
good to be done without it

So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw
them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and
Takver were building with their lives. The thing about
working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that
it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

269




Rodarred, the old capital of Avan Province, was a pointed
city: a forest of pines, and above the spires of the pines,
an airier forest of towers. The streets were dark and
narrow, mossy, often misty, under the trees. Only from the
seven bridges across the river could one look up and see
the tops of the towers. Some of them were hundreds of
feet tall, others were mere shoots, like ordinary houses
gone to seed. Some were of stone, others of porcelain, mo-
saic, sheets of colored glass, sheathin&s of copper, tin, or
gold. ornate beyond belief, delicate, glittering. In these
hallucinatory and charming streets the Urrasti Council of
World Governments had had its seat for the three hundred
years of its existence. Many embassies and consulates to
the CWG and to A-lo also clustered in Rodarred, only an
hour's ride from Nio Esseia and the national seat of gov-
ernment.

The Terran Bmbassy to the CWG was housed in the
River Castle, which crouched between the Nio highway
and the river, sending up only one squat, grudging tower
with a square roof and lateral window slits like narrowed
eyes. Its walls had withstood weapons and weathers for
fourteen hundred years. Dark trees clustered near its
landward side, and between them a drawbridge lay across
270

a moat. The drawbridge was down, and its gates stood
open. The moat, the river, the green grass, the black walls,
the flag on top of the tower, all glimmered mistily as the
sun broke through a river fog, and the bells in all the
towers of Rodarred began their prolonged and insanely
harmonious task of ringing seven o'clock.

A clerk at the very modem reception desk inside the
castle was occupied with a tremendous yawn. *'We aren't
really open till eight o'clock," he said hollowly.

*'I want to see the Ambassador/*

"The Ambassador is at breakfast YouTI have to make
an appointment" In saying this the clerk wiped his watery
eyes and was able to see the visitor clearly for the first
time. He stared, moved his jaw several times, and said»
"Who are you? Where— What do you want?"

<i! want to see the Ambassador."

"You just hold on," the clerk said in the purest Nioti
accent, still staring, and put out his hand to a telephone.

A car had Just drawn up between the drawbridge gate
and the entrance of the Embassy, and several men were
getting out of it, the metal fittings of their black coats
glittering in the sunlight Two other men had just entered
the lobby from the main part of the building, talking to-
gether, strange-looking people, strangely clothed. Shevek
hurried around the reception desk towards them, trying
to run. "Help me!" he said.

They looked up startled. One drew back, frowning. The
other one looked past Shevek at the uniformed group who
were just entering the Embassy. "Right in here," he said
with coolness, took Shevek'a arm, and shut himself and
Shevek into a little side office, with two steps and a gesture.
as neat as a ballet dancer. "What's up? You're from
Nio Esseia?"

"I want to see the Ambassador.**

**Are you one of the strikers?"

"Shevek. My name is Shevek. From Anarres.'*

The alien eyes flashed, brilliant, intelligent, in the jet-
black face. "Mai-god!" the Terran said under his breath.
and then, in lotic, "Are you asking asylum?"

"I don't know. I—"

"Come with me. Dr. Shevek. IT1 get you somewhere you
can sit down."

271

There were halls, stairs, the black man's hand on his
arm.

People were trying to take his coat off. He struggled
against them, afraid they were after the notebook in his
shirt pocket. Somebody spoke authoritatively in a foreign
language. Somebody else said to him, "It's all right He's
trying to find out if you're hurt. Your coat's bloody."

"Another man,'* Shevek said. "Another man's blood.**

He managed to sit up, though his head »wam. He was on
a couch in a large, sunlit room; apparently he kad fainted.
A couple of men and a woman stood near him. He looked
at them without understanding.

"You are in the Embassy of Terra, Dr. Shevek. You
are on Terran soil here. You are perfectly safe. You
can stay here as long as you want"

The woman's skin was yellow-brown, Kke ferrous earth,
and hairless, except on the scalp; not shaven, but hairless.
The features were strange and childlike, small mouth,
low-bridged nose, eyes with long full lids, cheeks and chin
rounded, fat-padded. The whole figure was rounded, sup-
ple, childlike.

''You are safe here," she repeated.

He tried to speak, but could not. One of the men pushed
him gently on the chest, saying, "Lie down, lie down."
He lay back. but he whispered. **I want to see the Am-
bassador."

"I'm the Ambassador. Keng is my name. We are glad
you came to us. You are safe here. Please rest now. Dr.
Shevek, and well talk later. There is no hurry." Her voice
had an odd, singsong quality, but it was husky, like Tak-
ver's voice.

*Takver,** he said, in his own language, "I don't know
what to do."

She said, "Sleep," and he slept

After two days' sleep and two days' meals, dressed again
in his grey loti suit, which they had cleaned and pressed
for him, he was shown into the Ambassador's private
salon on the third floor of the tower.

The Ambassador neither bowed to him nor shook his
hand, but joined her hands palm to pahn before her
breast and smiled. "I'm glad you feel better. Dr. Shevek.
No, I should say simply Shevek, shouldn't I? Please sit down.
272

I*m sorry that I have to speak to you in lotic, a foreign lan-
guage to both of vs. I dont know your language. I am told
that it's a most interesting one, the only rationally invented
language that has become the tongue of a great people."

He felt big, heavy, hairy, beside this suave alien. He sat
down in one of the deep, soft chairs. Keng also sat down,
but grimaced as she did so. "I have a bad back," she said,
"from sitting in these comfortable chairs!" And Shevek
realized then that she was not a woman of thirty or less, as
he had thought, but was sixty or more; her smooth skin
and childish physique had deceived him. "At home," she
went on, "we mostly sit on cushions on the floor. But if I
did that here I would have to look up even more at
everyone. You Cetians are all so talll . . . We have a little
problem. That is, we really do not, but the government of
A-Io does. Your people on Anarres, the ones who maintain
radio communication with Unas, you know, have been
asking very urgently to speak with you. And the loti
Government is embarrassed." She smiled, a smile of pure
amusement. "They don't know what to say."

She was calm. She was calm as a waterworo stone
which, contemplated, calms. Shevek sat back in his chair
and took a very considerable time to answer.

"Does the loti Government know that I'm here?*'

"Well, not officially. We have said nothing, they have
not asked. But we have several loti clerks and secretaries
working here in the Embassy. So, of course, they know."

"Is it a danger to you—my being here?"

"Oh no. Our embassy is to the Council of World Gov-
ernments, not to the nation of A-Io. You had a perfect
right to come here, which the rest of the Council would
force A-Io to admit. And as I told you, this castle is Ter-
ran soil." She smiled again; her smooth face folded into
many little creases, and unfolded. "A delightful fantasy of
diplomats! This castle eleven light-years from my Earth,
this room in a tower in Rodarred, in A-Io, on the planet
Unas of the sun Tau Ceti, is Terran soil."

"Then you can tell them I am here."

"Good. It will simplify matters. I wanted your consent."

**There was no ... message for me, from Anarres?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask. I didn't think of it from your
point of view. If you are worried about something, we
might broadcast to Anarres. We know the wave length
273

your people there have been using, of course, but we
haven't used it because we were not invited to. It seemed
best not to press. But we can easily arrange a conversation
for you."

"You have a transmitter?"

"We would relay through our ship—the Hainish ship
that stays in orbit around Urraa. Hain and Terra work to-
gether, you know. The Hainish Ambassador knows you're
with us; he is the only person who has been officially in-
formed. So the radio is at your service."

He thanked her, with the simplicity of one who does
not look behind the offer for the offer's motive. She
studied him for a moment, her eyes shrewd, direct, and
quiet. "I heard your speech," she said.

He looked at her as from a distance. "Speech?"

"When you spoke at the great demonstration in Capitol
Square. A week ago today. We always listen to the
clandestine radio, the Socialist Workers' and the Liber-
tarians' broadcasts. Of course, they were reporting the
demonstration. I heard you speak. I was very moved.
Then there was a noise, a strange noise, and one could
hear the crowd beginning to shout. They did not explain.
There was screaming. Then it died off the air suddenly. It
was terrible, terrible to listen to. And you were there. How
did you escape from that? How did you get out of the
city? Old Town is still cordoned off; there are three regi-
ments of the army in Nio; they round up strikers and
suspects by the dozen and hundred every day. How did
you get here?"

He smiled faintly. "In a taxi."

"Through all the checkpoints? And in that bloodstained
coat? And everyone knows what you look like."

"I was under the back seat. The taxi was comman-
deered, is that the word? It was a risk some people took
for me." He looked down at his hands, clasped on his lap.
He sat perfectly quietly and spoke quietly, but there was
an inner tension, a strain, visible in his eyes and in the
lines around his mouth. He thought a while, and went on
in the same detached way, "It was luck, at first. When I
came out of hiding, I was lucky not to be arrested at
once. But I got into Old Town. After that it was not just
luck. They thought for me where I might go, they planned
274

tow to get me there, they toot the risks." He said a word
in his own language, then translated it: "Solidarity, ..."

"It is very strange," aaid the Ambassador from Terra.
"I know almost nothing about your world, Shevek. I know
only what the Urrasti tell us, since your people won't let
us come there. I know, of course, that the planet is arid
and bleak, and how the colony was founded, that it is an
experiment in nonauthoritarian communism, that it has
survived for a hundred and seventy years. I have read a
little of Odo's writings—not very much. I thought that it
was all rather unimportant to matters on Urras now,
rather remote, an interesting experiment But I was
wrong, wasn't I? It is important. Perhaps Anarres is the
key to Urras. . . . The revolutionists in Nio, they come
from that same tradition. They weren't just striking for
better wages or protesting the draft. They are not only
socialists, they are anarchists; they were striking against
power. You see, the size of the demonstration, the in-
tensity of popular feeling, and the government's panic
reaction, all seemed very hard to understand. Why so
much commotion? The government here is not despotic.
The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very
poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving. Why aren't
they satisfied with bread and speeches? Why are they
supersensitive? . . . Now I begin to see why. But what is
still inexplicable is that the government of A-Io, knowing
this libertarian tradition was still alive, and knowing the
discontent in the industrial cities, still brought you here.
Like bringing the match to the powder mill!"

"I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept
from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich.
Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be
wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton
in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be
happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anar-
res. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they
could threaten you with it."

"Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the
other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?"

"With the annihilation of space."

She was silent a while. "Is that what you do?" she said
in her mild, amused voice.

"No. It is not what I do! In the first place, I am not an
275

inventor, an engineer. I am. a. theorist What they want
from me is a theory. A theory of the General Field in
temporal physics. Do you know what that is?"

"Shevek, your Cetian physics, your Noble Science, is
completely beyond my grasp. I am not trained in mathe-
matics, in physics, in philosophy, and it seems to consist of
all of those, and cosmology, and more besides. But I know
what you mean when you say the Theory of Simultaneity.
in the way I know what is meant by the Theory of Rela-
tivity; that is, I know that relativity theory led to certain
great practical results; and so I gather that your temporal
physics may make new technologies possible."

He nodded. "What they want," he said, "is the instan-
taneous transferral of matter across space. Transflience.
Space travel, you see, without traversal of space or laps6
of time. They may arrive at it yet; not from my equations,
I think. But they can make the ansible, with my equations,
if they want it Men cannot leap the great gaps, but ideas
can."

"What is an ansible, Shevek?'*

"An idea." He smiled without much humor. "It win be
a device that will permit communication without any time
interval between two points in space. The device will not
transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But
to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a
transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk
between worlds, without the long waiting for the message
to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic im-
pulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Uke a
kind of telephone."

Keng laughed. "The simplicity of physicists! So I could
pick up the—ansible?—and talk with my son in Delhi?
And with my granddaughter, who was five when I left,
and who lived eleven years while I was traveling from
Terra to Unas in a nearly light-speed ship. And I could
find out what's happening at home now, not eleven years
ago. And decisions could be made, and agreements
reached, and information shared. I could talk to diplomats
on Chiffewar, you could talk to physicists on Hain, it
wouldn't take ideas a generation to get from world to
world. ... Do you know, Shevek, I think your very sim-
ple matter might change the lives of all the billions of peo-
ple in the nine Known Worlds?"
276

He nodded.

"It would make a league of worlds possible. A federa-
tion. We have been held apart by the years, the decades
between leaving and arriving, between question and re-
sponse. It's as if you had invented human speech! We can
talk—at last we can talk together."
"And what wiD you say?"

His bitterness startled Keng. She looked at him and said
nothing.

He leaned forward in his chair and nibbed his forehead
painfully. "Look," he said, "I must explain to you why I
have come to you, and why I came to this world also. I
came for the idea. For the sake of the idea. To learn, to
teach, to share in the idea. On Anarres, you see, we have
cut ourselves off. We don't talk with other people, the
rest of humanity. I could not finish my work there. And if
I had been able to finish it, they did not want it, they saw
no use in it So I came here. Here is what I need—die
talk, the sharing, an experiment in the Light Laboratory
that proves something it wasn't meant to prove, a book of
Relativity Theory from an alien world, the stimulus I
need. And so I finished the work, at last. It is not written
out yet but I have the equations and the reasoning, it is
done. But the ideas in my head aren't the only ones imr-
portant to me. My society is also an idea. I was made by
it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human tolidarity, an
important idea. And though I was very stupid I saw at last
that by pursuing the one, the physics, I am betraying the
other. I am letting the propertarians buy the truth from
me."

"What else could you do, Shevek?"
"Is there no alternative to selling? b there not such a
thing as the gift?"
"Yes—"

"Do you not understand that I want to give this to you
—and to Hain and the other worlds—and to the countries
of Urraa? But to you all! So that one of you cannot use if
as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get
richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the
truth for your private profit but only for the common
good."

"In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only
the common good," Keng said.
277

"Tn the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the
end. I have one lifetime, and I wiD not spend it for greed
and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master."

Kong's calmness was a much more forced, willed affair
than it kad been at the beginning of their talk. The
strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-
consdousness or consideration of self-defense, was for-
midable. She was shaken by him* and looked at him with
compassion and a certain awe.

"What a it like,** she said, "what can it be like, the
society that made you? I heard you speak of Anarres, in
the Square, and I wept listening to you, but I didn't really
believe you. Men always speak so of their homes, of the
absent land. .. . But you are not like other men. There is
a difference in you."

"The difference of the idea,1* he said. "It was for that
Idea that I came here, too. For Anarres. Since my people
refuse to look outward, I thought I might make others
look at us. I thought it would be better not to hold apart
behind a wall, but to be a society among the others, a
world among the others, giving and taking. But there I
was wrong—I was absolutely wrong."

"Why so? Surely—"

"Because there is nothing, nothing on Unas that we
Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and
seventy years ago, and we were right We took nothing.
Because there is nothing here but States and their weap-
ons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery.
There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Ur-
ras. There a nothing you can do that profit does not enter
Into, and fear of loss, and me wish for power. You cannot
say good morning without knowing which of you is 'su-
perior* to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot
act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate
them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them.
You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave
you alone. There is no freedom. It Is a box—Unas is a
box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky
and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open
the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust,
and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because
he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar
was right; it is Urras; HeU is Urras."
278

;    -.

*

For all his passion he spoke simply, with a kind of
humility, and again the Ambassador from Terra watched
him with a guarded yet sympathetic wonder, as if she had
no idea how to take that simplicity.

"We are both aliens here, Shevek," she said at last. **I
from much farther away in space and time. Yet I begin to
think that I am much less alien to Unas than you are....
Let me teQ you how this world seems to me. To me, and
to an my fellow Terrans who have seen the planet, Unas:

is the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of an the in-
habited worlds. It is the world that comes as dose as any
could to Paradise.'*

She looked at him calmly and keenly; he said nothing.

"I know it's full of evils, full of human injustice, greed,
folly, waste. But it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality,
achievement. It Is what a world should bel It is alive,
tremendously alive—alive, despite all its evils, with hope.
Is that not true?**

He nodded.

"Now, you man from a world I cannot even imagine,
you who see my Paradise as HeU, will you ask what my
world must be like?"

He was silent, watching her, his light eyes steady.

"My world, my Earth* is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the
human spedes. We multiplied and gobbled and fought un-
til there w&a nothing left, and then we died. We controlled
neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt We de-
stroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There
are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is
grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable,
but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony.
Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Ter*
rans made a desert... We survive there, as you do. Peo-
ple are toughl There are nearly a half billion of us now.
Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities!
still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the
little pieces of plastic never do—they never adapt either.
We failed as a species, as a social species. We are here
now, dealing as equals with other human societies on oth-
er worlds, only because of the chanty of the Hainish. They
came; they brought us help. They built ships and gave
them to us, so we could leave our ruined world. They
treat us gently, charitably, as the strong man treats the
279

sicfc one. They are a very strange people, the Hainish;

older than any of us; infinitely generous. They are altruists.
They are moved by a guilt we don't even understand,
despite an our crimes. They are moved in all they do, I
think, by the past. their endleaa past Well, we had saved
what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins,
on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total cen-
tralization. Total control over the use of every acre of
land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total
rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription
into the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each
life toward the goal of racial survival. We had achieved
that much, when the Hainish came. They brought us ... a
little more hope. Not very much. We have outlived it. .^..
We can only look at this splendid world, this vital society,
this Urras, this Paradise, from the outside. We are capable
only of admiring it, and maybe envying it a little. Not
very much."

"Then Anarres, as you heard me speak of it—what
would Anarres mean to you, Keng?"

Nothing. Nothing, Shevek. We forfeited our chance
for Anarres centuries ago, before it ever came into being."

Shevek got up and went over to the window, one of the
long horizontal window slits of the tower. There was a
niche in the wall below it, into which an archer would
step up to look down and aim at assailants at the gate; if
one did not take that step up one could see nothing from
it but the sunwashed, slightly misty sky. Shevek stood be-
low the window gazing out, the light filling his eyes.

"You don't understand what time is," he said. '^ou say
the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change,
no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be
reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is
nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable
present, the moment now. And you think that ia some-
thing which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You
think ifs something you would like to have. But it is not
real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is.
Things change, change. You cannot have anything. . . .
And least of all can you have the present, unless you ac-
cept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but
also the future, not only the future but also the pasti Be-
cause they are real: only their reality makes the present
280

real. You wW not achieve or even understand Urras unless
you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres.
You are right, we are the key. But when you said that,
you did not really believe it. You don't believe in Anarres.
You dont believe in me, though I stand with you, in this
room, in this moment . . . My people were right, and I
was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you. You will not
let us. You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolu-
tion. You would destroy us rather than admit our reality.
rather than admit that there is hope! We cannot come to
you. We can only wait for you to come to us."

Keng sat with a startled and thoughtful, and perhaps
slightly dazed, expression.

**I don't understand—I don*t understand." she said at
last "You are like somebody from our own past, the old
idealists, the visionaries of freedom', and yet I don't un-
derstand you, as if you were trying to tell me of future
things; and yet, as you say, you are here, nowl . . ." She
had not lost her shrewdness. She said after a little while,
'Then why is it that you came to me, Shevek?"

"Oh, to give you the idea. My theory, you know. To
save it from becoming a property of the loti, an invest-
ment or a weapon- If you are willing, the simplest thing
to do would be to broadcast the equations, to give them
to physicists all over this world, and to the Hainish and
the other worlds, as soon as possible. Would you be will-
ing to do that?"

"More than willing.'*

"It will come to only a few pages. The proofs and some
of the implications would take longer, but that can come
later, and other people can work on them if I cannot."

"But what will you do then? Do you mean to go back
to Nio? The city is quiet now, apparently; the insurrection
seems to be defeated, at least for the time being; but I'm
afraid the loti government regards you as an insurrec-
tionary. There is Thu, of course—"

"No. I don't want to stay here. I am no altruist! If you
would help me in this too, I might go home. Perhaps the
loti would be willing to send me home, even. It would be
consistent, I think: to make me disappear, to deny my
existence. Of course, they might find it easier to do by
killing me or putting me in Jail for life. I don't want to die
yet, and I don't want to die here in Hell at all. Where
281

does your soul go, when you die in Hell?" He laughed; he
had regained all his gentleness of manner. But if you could
send me home, I think they would be relieved. Dead
anarchists mate martyrs, you know, and keep living for
centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten."

"I thought I knew what 'realism* was," Keng said. She
smiled, but U was not an easy smile.

"How can you, if you don't know what hope is?"

^ont judge us too hardly, Shevek."

"I dont judge you at all. I only ask your help, for which
I have nothing to give in return.'*

"Nothing? You call your theory nothing?"

"Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single
human spirit," he said, turning to her, "and which will
weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.**

282

Chapter 12




**! want to introduce a project," said Bedap, "from the
Syndicate of Initiative. You know that we've been m radio
contact with Unas for about twenty decads—"

"Against the recommendation of this council, and the
Defense Federative, and a majority vote of the Usti"

"Yes," Bedap said, looking the speaker up and down,
but not protesting the interruption. There were no rules
of parliamentary procedure at meetings in PDC. Inter-
ruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements.
The process, compared to a well-managed executive con"
ference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring
diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wir-
ing diagram would, in its place—inside a living animaL

Bedap knew all his old opponents on the Import-Export
Council; he had been coming and fighting them for three
years now. This speaker was a new one, a young man,
probably a new lottery posting to the PDC List Bedap
looked him over benevolently and went on, "Let's not re-
fight old quarrels, shall we? I propose a new one. We've
received an interesting message from a group on Urras. It
came on the wave length our loti contacts use, but it
didn't come at a scheduled time, and was a weak signal,
It seems to have been sent from a country called Benbili,
283

not from A-Io. The group called themselves The Odonian
Society.' It appears that they're post-Settlement Odonians,
existing in some fashion in the loopholes of law and
government on Urras. Their message was to *the brothers
on Anarres.* You can read it in the Syndicate bulletin, it's
interesting. They ask if they might be allowed to send
people here."

"Send people here? Let Urrasti come here? Spies?"
"No, as settlers.'*

*They want the Settlement reopened, is that it, Bedap?"
They »ay they're being hounded by their government,
and are hoping for—"

"Reopen the Settlement! To any profiteer who calk
himself an Odonian?"

To report an Anarresti managerial debate in fim would
be difficult; it went very fast, several people often speak-
ing at once, nobody speaking at great length, a good deal
of sarcasm, a great deal left unsaid; the tone emotional,
often fiercely personal; an end was reached, yet there was
no conclusion. It was like an argument among brothers, or
among thoughts m an undecided mind.

"If we let these so-called Odonians come, how do they
propose to get here?"

There spoke the opponent Bedap dreaded, the cool, in-
telligent woman named Rulag. She had been his cleverest
enemy all year in the council- He glanced at Shevek, who
was attending this council for the first time, to draw his
attention to her. Somebody had told Bedap that Rmag was
an engineer, and he had found in her the engineer's clarity
and pragmatism of mind, plus the mechanist's hatred of
complexity and irregularity. She opposed we Syndicate of
Initiative on every issue, including that of its right to exist
Her agnunents were good, and Bedap respected her.
Sometimes when she spoke of the strength of Urras, and
the danger of bargaining with the strong from a position
of weakness, he believed her.

For there were times when Bedap wondered, privately,
whether he sad Shevek, when they got together in the
winter of '68 and discussed the means by which a frus-
trated physicist might print bis work and communicate it
to physicists on Unas, had not set off an uncontrollable
chain of events. When they had finally set up radio con-
tact, the Urrasti had been more eager to talk, to exchange
284

information, than they had expected; and when they had
printed reports of those exchanges, the opposition on
Anarres had been more virulent than they had expected.
People on both worlds were paying more attention to
them than was really comfortable. When the enemy en-
thusiastically embraces you. and the fellow countrymen
bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in
fact, a traitor.

"I suppose they'd come on one of the freighters," he
replied. "Like good Odonians, they'd hitchhike. If their
government, or the Council of World Governments, let
them. Would they let them? Would the archists do the
anarchists a favor? That's what I'd like to find out. If we
invited a small group, six or eight, of these people, what
would happen at that end?"

"Laudable curiosity," Rulag said. "We'd know the dan-
ger better, all right, if we knew better how things really
work on Unas. But the danger lies m the act of finding
out." She stood up, signifying that she wanted to hold the
floor for more than a sentence or two. Bedap winced, and
glanced again at Shevek, who sat beside him. "Look out
for this one," he muttered. Shevek made no response, but
he was usually reserved and shy at meetings, no good at
all unless he got moved deeply by something, in which
case he was a surprisingly good speaker. He sat looking
down at his hands. But as Rulag spoke, Bedap noticed that
though she was addressing him* she kept glancing at She-
vek.

"Your Syndicate of Initiative," she said, emphasizing
the pronoun, "has proceeded with building a transmitter.
with broadcasting to Urras and receiving from them, and
with publishing the communications. You've done all this
against the advice of the majority of the PDC, and in-
creasing protests from the entire Brotherhood. There have
been no reprisals against your equipment or yourselves
yet, largely, I believe, because we Odonians have
become unused to the very idea of anyone's adopting a
course harmful to others and persisting in it against ad-
vice and protest. It's a rare event In fact, you are the
first of us who have behaved in the way that archist critics
always predicted people would behave in a society without
laws: with total irresponsibility towards the society's wel-
fare. I don't propose to go again into the harm you've al-
285

ready done, and handing out of scientific information to a
powerful enemy, the confession of our weakness that each
of your broadcasts to Urraa represents. But now, thinking
that we've got used to all that, you're proposing some-
thing very much worse. What's the difference, youTI say,
between talking to a few Urrasti on the shortwave and
talking to a few of them here in Abbenay? What's the dif-
ference? What's the difference between a shut door and
an open one? Let's open the door—that's what he's saying,
you know, ammari. Let's open the door, let the Urrasti
cornel Six or eight pseudo-Odonians on the next freighter.
Sixty or eighty loti profiteers on the one after, to look us
over and see how we can be divided up as a property
among the nations of Unas. And the next trip will be six
or eight hundred armed ships of war: guns, soldiers, ^an
occupying force. The end of Anarres, the end of the
Promise. Our hope lies, it has lain for a hundred and
seventy years, in the Terms of the Settlement: No Ur-
rasti off the ships, except the Settlers, then, or ever. No
mixing. No contact To abandon that principle now is to
say to the tyrants whom we defeated once. The experiment
has failed, come re-enslave usi"

"Not at an,'* Bedap said promptly. "The message is
dear: The experiment has succeeded, we're strong enough
now to face you as equals."

The argument proceeded as before, a rapid hammering
of issues. It did not last long. No vote was taken, as usual.
Almost everyone present was strongly for sticking to the
Terms of the Settlement, and as soon as this became clear
Bedap said, "All right. 111 take that as settled. Nobody
comes in on the Kuieo Fart or the Mindful. In the matter
of bringing Urrasti to Anarres, the Syndicate's aims clearly
must yield to the opinion of the society as a whole; we
asked your advice, and well follow it. But there's an-
other aspect of the same question. Shevek?"

"Weu, there's the question," Shevek said, "Of sending
an Anarresti to Unas."

There were exclamations and queries. Shevek did not
raise his voice, which was not far above a mumble, but
persisted, "It wouldn't harm or threaten anyone living on
Anarres. And it appears that it's a matter of the individ-
ual's right; a kind of test of it, in fact. The Terms of the
Settlement don't forbid ft. To forbid it now would be an
286

assumption of authority by the PDC, an abridgment of
the right of the Odonian individual to initiate action harm-
less to others."

Rulag sat forward. She was smiling a little. "Anyone
can leave Anarres,'* she said. Her light eyes glanced from
Shevek to Bedap and back. "He can go whenever he likes.
if the propertarians' freighters win take him. He cast
come back."

"Who says he cant?" Bedap demanded.

"The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement. Nobody
will be allowed off the freight ships farther than the
boundary of the Port of Anarres.**

"Well, now. that was surely meant to apply to Urrastf.
not Anarresti," said an old adviser, Ferdaz, who liked to
stick his oar in even when it steered the boat off the
course he wanted.

"A person coming from Urras is an Urrasti," said Rulag.

"Legalisms, legalismsl What's all this quibbling?" said
a calm, heavy woman named TrepiL

"Quibbling! ** cried the new member, the young man.
He had a Northrising accent and a deep, strong voice. "If
you don't like quibbling, try this. If there are people
here that dont like Anarres, let *em go. 1*11 help. m carry
*em to the Port, I'll even kick *em there! But if they try
to come sneaking back, there's going to be some of us
there to meet them. Some real Odoniana. And they wont
find us smiling and saying, "Welcome home, brothers.'
They'll find their teeth knocked down their throats and
their balls kicked up into their bellies. Do you understand
that? Is it clear enough for you?"

"Clear, no; plain, yes. Plain ax a fart." said Bedap.
'"Clarity is a function of thought. You should leam some
Odoniamsm before you speak here."

"You're not worthy to say the name of Odo!" the
young man shouted. 'Tfou're traitors, you and the whole
Syndicate! There are people all over Anarres watching
you. You think we dont know that Shevek*s been asked to
go to Urras, to go seU Anarresti science to the profiteers?
You think we don't know that all you snivelers would
love to go there and live rich and let the propertarians pat
you on the back? You can got Good riddance! But if you
try coming back here, you'U meet with Justicel"
287

He was on his feet and leaning across the table, shout-
ing straight into Bedap's face. Bedap looked up at him
'and said, ''You dont mean justice, you mean punishment.
Do you think they're the same thing?"

"He means violence," Rulag said. "And if there is
violence, you will have caused it. You and your Syndicate.
And you will have deserved it."

A thin, small, middle-aged man beside Trepu began
speaking, at first so softly, in a voice hoarsened by the
dust cough, that few of them heard him. He was a visiting
delegate from a Southwest miners* syndicate, not expected
to speak on this matter. **. . . what men deserve," he was
Saying. "For we each of us deserve everything, every lux-
ury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings,
•and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of
bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved?
Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the
virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punish-
ment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea
of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be
able to think." They were, of course, Odo's words from the
Prison Letters, but spoken in the weak, hoarse voice they
made a strange effect, as if the man were working them
out word by word himself, as if they came from his
own heart, slowly, with difficulty, as the water wells up
slowly, slowly, from the desert sand.

Rulag listened, her head erect, her face set, like that of
a person repressing pain. Across the table from her Shevek
sat with his head bowed. The words left a silence after
them, and he looked up and spoke into it.

**You see," he said, *'what we're after is to remind our-
selves that we didn't come to Anarres for safety, but for
freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we're no
better than a machine. If an individual can't work in
solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone.
His duty and his right. We have been denying people that
right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must
work with the others, you must accept the rule of the
majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individ-
ual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts,
to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live,
and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of
(a State founded upon law, but members of a society
288

founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our
hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual
spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is
seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.' We cant
stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.'*

Rulag replied, as quietly as he, but very coldly, "you
have no right to involve us all in a risk that private mo-
tives compel you to take.**

"No one who will not go as far as I'm willing to go has
any right to stop me from going," Shevek answered. Their
eyes met for a second; both looked down.

*The risk of a trip to Urras involves nobody but the
person going," Bedap said. "It changes nothing in the
Terms of the Settlement, and nothing in our relationship
with Urras, except, perhaps, morally—to our advantage.
But I dont think we're ready, any of us, to decide on it.
m withdraw the topic for the present, if it's agreeable to
the rest of you."*

They assented, and he and Shevek left the meeting.

"I've got to go over to the Institute," Saevek said as
they came out of the PDC building. "Sabul sent me one of
his toenail dippings—first in years. What's on his mind, I
wonder?"

"What's on that woman Rulag's mind, I wonderi She's
got a personal grudge against you. Envy, I suppose. We
won't put you two across a table again, or well get no-
where. Though that young fellow from Northrising was
bad news, too. Majority rule and might makes right! Are
we going to get our message across, Shev? Or are we
only hardening the opposition to it?"

"We may really have to send somebody off to Urras—
prove our right to by acts, if words won't do it."

"Maybe. So long as it isn't mel I'll talk myself purple
about our right to leave Anarres, but if I had to do it, by
damn, I'd slit my throat"

Shevek laughed. "I've got to go. TO. be home in an hour
or so. Come eat with us tonight"
"ITI meet you at the room.**

Shevek set off down the street with his long stride;

Bedap stood hesitating in front of the PDC building. It
was midaftemoon, a windy, sunny, cold spring day. The
streets of Abbenay were bright, scoured-looking, alive
with light and people. Bedap felt both excited and let
289

down. Everything, including Ms emotions, was promising
yet unsatisfactory. He went off to the domicile in the
Pekesh Block where Shevek and Takver now lived, and
found, as he had hoped, Takver at home with the baby.

Takver had miscarried twice and then Pilua bad come
along, late and a little unexpected, but very welcome. She
had been small at birth and now, getting on to two, was
still small, with thin arms and legs. When Bedap held her
he was always vaguely frightened of or repelled by the
feeling of those arms, so fragile that he could have broken
them simply with a twist of his hand. He was very fond of
Pilun, fascinated by her cloudy grey eyes and won by her
utter trustfulness, but whenever he touched her he knew
consciously, as he had not done before, what the attrac-
tion of cruelty is. why the strong torment the weak. Aod
therefore—though he could not have said why "therefore"
—he also understood something that had never made muck
sense to him, or interested him at all: parental feeling. It
gave him a most extraordinary pleasure when Pflun called
him •tadde."

He sat down on the bed platform under the window. It
was a good-sized room with two platforms. The floor was
matted; there was no other furniture, no chairs or tables,
only a little movable fence that marked off a play space
or screened Pilun's bed. Takver had the long, wide drawer
of the other platform open. sorting piles of papers kept in
ft. *T)o hold Pilun, dear Dapl" she said with her large
Bmfle, when the baby began working towards him. **She'8
been into these papers at least ten times, every time I get
them sorted. Ill be done in just a minute here—ten
minutes."

•'Don't hurry. I dont want to talk. I just want to sit
here. Come on, Pilun. Walk—there's a girl! Walk to
Tadde Dap. Now I've got youl"

Puun sat contentedly on his knees and studied his hand,
Bedap was ashamed of his nails, which he no longer bit
but which remained deformed from biting, and at first h&
closed his hand to hide them; then he was ashamed of
shame, and opened up his hand. Pilun patted it

*Thu is a nice room." he said. "With the north light.
11*8 always calm in here."

"Yes. Shh, I'm counting these."
After a while she put the piles of paper away and shut
290

the drawer. "Therel Sorry. I told Shev I'd page that
article for him. How about a drink?"

Rationing was still in force on many staple foods,
though much less strict than it had been five years before.
The fruit orchards of Northrising bad suffered less and
recovered quicker from the drought than the grain-grow-
ing regions, and last year dried fruits and fruit juices had
gone off the restricted list Takver had a bottle standing in
the shaded window. She poured them each a cupful, in
rather lumpy earthenware cups which Sadik had made at
school. She sat down opposite Bedap and looked at him,
smiling. "Well. how's it going at PDC?"

"Same as ever. How's the fish lab?"

Takver looked down into her cup, moving it to catch
the light on the surface of the liquid. **I don't know. I'm
thinking of quitting."

"Why, Takver?"

"Rather quit than be told to. The trouble is, I like that?
Job, and I'm good at it. And it's the only one like it in
Abbenay. But you can't be a member of a research team
that's decided you're not a member of it."

"They're coming down harder on you, are they?"

"All the time," she said, and looked rapidly and un-
consciously at the door, as if to be sure that Shevek wa^
not there, hearing. "Some of them are unbelievable. Well,
you know. There's no use going on about it."

"No, that's why I'm glad to catch you alone. I dont
really know. I, and Shev, and Skovan, and Gezach, and
the rest of us who spend most of the time at the printing;

shop or the radio tower, don't have postings, and so we
don't see much of people outside the Syndicate of Initia-
tive. I'm at PDC a lot, but that's a special situation, I ex-
pect opposition there because I create it What is it mat
you run up against?"

"Hatred," Takver said, in her dark, soft voice. 'Tteal
hatred. The director of my project won't speak to me any
more. Well, that's not much loss. He's a stick anyhow.,
But some of the others do tell me what they think. . . .
There's a woman, not at the fish labs, here in the dom. I'm
on the block sanitation committee and I had to go speak
to her about something. She wouldn't let me talk. *Doa'f
you try to come into this room, I know you, you damned
traitors, you intellectuals, you egoizers' and so on and so
291

on, and then slammed the door. It was grotesque." Takver
laughed without humor. Pilun, seeing her laugh, smiled as
she sat curled in the angle of Bedap's arm, and then
yawned. "But you know, it was frightening. I'm a coward,
Dap. I don't like violence. I don't even like disapproval!"

"Of course not. The only security we have is our neigh-
bors* approval. An archist can break a law and hope to
get away unpunished, but you can't 'break' a custom; it's
the framework of your life with other people. We're
only just beginning to feel what it's like to be revolution-
aries, as Shev put it in the meeting today. And it isnt
comfortable."

"Some people understand," Takver said with determined
optimism. "A woman on the omnibus yesterday, I don't
know where I'd met her, tenth-day work some time, I
suppose; she said, *It must be wonderful to live with a
great scientist, it must be so interestingi' And I said, *Yea»
at least there's always something to talk about*.. . . Pilun,
don't go to sleep, babyl Shevek will be home soon and
well go to commons. Jiggle her. Dap. Well, anyway, you
gee, she knew who Sbev was, but she wasn't hateful or
disapproving, she was very nice."

"People do know who he is," Bedap said. "It's funny,
because they cant understand his books any more than I
can. A few hundred do, he thinks. Those students in the
Divisional Institutes who try to organize Simultaneity
courses. I think a few dozen would be a liberal estimate,
myself. And yet people know of him, they have tlys feel-
ing he's something to be proud of. That's one thing the
Syndicate has done, I suppose, if nothing else. Printed
Shev's books. It may be the only wise thing we've done."

"Oh, now! You must have had a bad session at PDO
today."

"We did. I'd like to cheer you up. Takver. but I can't
The Syndicate is cutting awfully close to the basic societal
bond, the fear of the stranger. There was a young fellow
there today openly threatening violent reprisal. Well, it's
a poor option, but he*U find others ready to take it. And
that Rulag, by damn, she's a formidable opponenti"

"You know who she is. Dap?'*

"Who she is?"

"Shev never told you? Well, he doesnt talk about her.
She's the mother."

292

-Shev's mother?"

Takver nodded. "She left when he was two. The father
stayed with him. Nothing unusual, of course. Except Shev's
feelings. He feels that he lost something essential—he and
the father both. He doesn't make a general principle out of
it, that parents should always keep the children, or any-
thing. But the importance loyalty has for him, it goes back
to that, I flunk.**

"What's unusual," said Bedap energetically, oblivious of
Pilun, who had gone sound asleep on his lap, "distinctly
unusual, is her feelings about himi She's been waiting for
him to come to an Import-Export meeting, you could tell,
today. She knows he's the soul of the group, and she hates
us because of him. Why? Guilt? Has the Odonian Society
gone so rotten we're motivated by guilt? . . . You know,
now that I know it, they look alike. Only in her, it's all
gone hard, rock-hard—dead.'*

The door opened as he was speaking. Shevek and Sadik
came in. Sadik was ten years old, tall for her age and thin.
all long legs, supple and fragile, with a cloud of dark
hair. Behind her came Shevek; and Bedap, looking at him
in the curious new light of his kinship with Rulag, saw him
as one occasionally sees a very old friend, with a vividness
to which all the past contributes: the splendid reticent
face, ful* of life but worn down, worn to the bone. It was
an intensely individual face, and yet the features were not
only like Rulag's but like many others among the Anar-
resti, a people selected by a vision of freedom, and adapted
to a barren world, a world of distances, silences, desola-
tions.

In the room, meantime, much closeness, commotion,
communion: greetings, laughter, Pilun being passed
around, rather crossly on her part, to be hugged, the bottle
being passed around to be poured, questions, conversations.
Sadik was the center first, because she was the least often
there of the family; then Shevek. "What did old Greasy
Beard want?"

"Were you at the Institute?" Takver asked, examining
him as he sat beside her.

"Just went by there. Sabul left me a note this morning
at the Syndicate." Shevek drank off his fruit mice and
lowered the cup, revealing a curious set to his mouth, a
293

nonexpression. "He said the Physics Federation has a full-
time posting to fill. Autonomous, permanent."

"For you, you mean? There? At the Institute?"

He nodded,

"Sabul told you?**

*'He's trying to enlist you," Bedap said.

"Yes, I think so. H you cant uproot it, domesticate it,
as we used to say in Northsetting." Shevek suddenly and
spontaneously laughed. "It is funny, isn*t it?** he said.

'•No," said Takver. "It isn*t funny. It's disgusting. How
could you go talk to him, even? After all the slander he*a
spread about you, and the lies about the Principles being
stolen from him, and not telling you that the Urrasd gave
you that prize, and then Just last year, when he got those
kids who organized the lecture series broken up and seat
away because of your *crypto-authoritarian influence* over
them—you an authoritarian!—that was sickening, unfor-
givable. How can you be civil to a man like that?"

"Well, it isnt all Sabul, you know. He's just a spokes-
man."

"I know, but he loves to be the spokesman. And he's
been so squalid for so long! Well, what did you say to
him?"

"I temporized—as you might say," Shevek said, and
laughed again. Takver glanced at him again, knowing
now that he was, for all his control, in a state of extreme
tension or excitement.

"You didn't turn him down flat, then?"

"I said that I'd resolved some years ago to accept no
regular work postings, so long as I was able to do theoreti-
cal work. So he said that since it was an autonomous
post Fd be completely free to go on with the research Fd
been doing, and the purpose of giving me the post was to
—let's see how he put it—to facilitate access to experi-
mental equipment at the Institute, and to the regular
channels of publication and dissemination.' The PDC press,
in other words."

**Why, then you've won," Takver said, looking at him
with a queer expression. "You've won. They'll print what
you write. It's what you wanted when we came back here
five years ago. The walls are down,"
"There are walls behind the walls," Bedap said.
"I've won only if I accept the posting. Sabul is offering
294

to ... legalize me. To make roe official. In order to
dissociate me from the Syndicate of Initiative. Don't you
see that as his motive. Dap?"

"Of course," Bedap said. His face was somber. "Divide
to weaken."

"But to take Shev back into the Institute, and print what
he writes on the PDC press, is to give implied approval to
the whole Syndicate, isn't it?"

"It ought mean that to most people," Shevek said.

**No, it won't," Bedap said. "Itll be explained. The great
physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while.
Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they
think about irrelevant things like time and space and reali-
ty, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they
are easily fooled by wicked deviationists. But the good
Odonians at the Institute gently showed him his errors
and he has returned to the path of social-organic truth.
Leaving the Syndicate of Initiative shorn of its one con-
ceivable claim to the attention of anybody on Anarres or
Urras"

"I'm not leaving the Syndicate, Bedap."

Bedap lifted his head, and said after a minute, "No. I
know you're not."

"All right Let's go to dinner. This belly growls: listen
to it. Pilun, hear it? Rrowr, rrowrl"

"Hup!" Pilun said in a tone of command. Shevek picked
her up and stood up, swinging her onto his shoulder. Be-
hind his head and the child's, the single mobile hanging in
this room oscillated slightly. It was a large piece made of
wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disap-
peared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned
flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the
two thin, clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval
wires in complexly interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the
common center, never quite meeting, never entirely part-
ing. Takver called it the Inhabition of Time.

They went to the Pekesh commons, and waited till the
registry board showed a sign-out, so they could bring Be-
dap in as a guest. His registering there signed him out at
the commons where he usually ate, as the system was co-
ordinated citywide by a computer. It was one of the highly
mechanized "homeostatic processes" beloved by the eariy
Settlers, which persisted only in Abbenay. Like the less
295

elaborate arrangements used elsewhere, it never quite
worked out; there were shortages, surpluses, and frustra-
tions, but not major ones. Sign-outs at Pekesh commons
were infrequent, as the kitchen was the best known in
Abbenay. having a tradition of great cooks. An opening
appeared at last, and they went in. Two young people
whom Bedap knew slightly as dom neighbors of Shevek*s
and Takver's joined them at table. Otherwise they were
let alone—left alone. Which? It did not seem to matter.
They had a good dinner, a good time talking. But every
BOW and then Bedap felt that around them there was a
circle of silence.

"I don't know what the Urrasti will think up next," he
said, and though he was speaking lightly he found himself,
to his annoyance, lowering his voice. "They've asked to
come here, and asked Shev to come there; what will the
next move be?"

"I didn't know they'd actually asked Shev to go there,"
Takver said with a half frown.

"Yes, you did." Shevek said. "When they told me that
they'd given me the prize, you know, the Seo Oen, they
asked if I couldnt come, remember? To get the money
that goes with ill" Shevek smiled, luminous. If there was
a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he
had alway been alone.

Thafs right. I did know that. It just didn't register as
an actual possibility. You'd been talking for decads about
suggesting in PDC that somebody might go to Urras, just
to shock them."

That's what we finally did, this afternoon. Dap made
me say it."

"Were they shocked?"

"Hair on end, eyes bulging—**

Takver giggled. Pilun sat in a high chair next to Shevek,
exerdsinf her teeth on a piece of holum bread and her
voice in song. "0 mathery bathery," she proclaimed, "ab-
bery abbery babber dabi** Shevek, versatile, replied in
the same vein. Adult conversation proceeded without in-
tensity and with interruptions. Bedap did not mind, he had
learned lonf ago that you took Shevek with complications
or not at alL The most silent one of them all was Sadik.

Bedap stayed on with them for an hour after dinner in
the pleasant, spacious common rooms of the domicile, and
296

when he got up to go offered to accompany Sadik to her
school dormitory, which was on his way. At this something
happened, one of those events or signals obscure to those
outside a family; all he knew was that Shevek, with no
fuss or discussion, was coming along. Takver had to go
feed Pflun, who was getting louder and louder. She kissed
Bedap, and he and Shevek set off with Sadik, talking. They
talked hard, and walked right past the learning center.
They turned back. Sadik had stopped before the dormi-
tory entrance. She stood motionless, erect and slight, her
face still, in the weak light of the street lamp. Shevek stood
equally still for a moment, then went to her. "What is
wrong, Sadik?"

The child said, "Shevek, may I stay in the room to-
night?"

"Of course. But whafs wrong?"

Sadik'a delicate, long face quivered and seemed to frag-
ment. "They dont like me, in the dormitory," she said, her
voice becominf shrill with tension, but even softer than
before.

They don't like you? What do you mean?"

They did not touch each other yet. She answered him
with desperate courage. "Because they dont like—they
don't like the Syndicate, and Bedap, and—and you. They
call— The big sister in the dorm room, she said you—we
were all tr— She said we were traitors," and saying the
word the child jerked as if she had been shot, and Shevek
caught her and held her. She held to him with all her
strength, 'weeping in great gasping soba. She was too old,
too tall for him to pick up. He stood holding her, stroking
her hair. He looked over her dark head at Bedap. His
own eye* were full of tears. He said, "It's all right. Dap.
Goon."

There was nothing for Bedap to do but leave them
there, the man and the child, in that one intimacy which
he could not share, the hardest and deepest, the intimacy
of pain. It gave him no sense of relief or escape to go;

rather he felt useless, diminished. "I am thirty-nine years
old," he thought as he walked on towards his domicile, the
five-man room where he lived in perfect independence.
"Forty in a few decada. What have I done? What have I
been doing? Nothing. Meddling. Meddling in other people's
lives because I don't have one. I never took the time.
297

And the time's going to run out on me, all at once, and I
will never have had . . . that." He looked back, down the
long, quiet street, where the comer lamps made soft pools
of light in the windy darkness, but he had gone too far to
see the father and daughter, or they had gone. And what
he meant by "that" he could not have said, good as he
was with words; yet he felt that he understood it clearly.
that all his hope was in that understanding, and that if he
would be saved he must change his life.

When Sadik was calm enough to let go of him, Shevek
left her litting on the front step of the dormitory, and
went in to tell the vigilkeeper that she would be staying
with the parents this night. The vigilkeeper spoke coldly to
him. Adults who worked in children's dormitories had a
natural tendency to disapprove of overnight dom visits,
finding them disruptive; Shevek told himself he was prob-
ably mistaken in feeling anything more than such disap-
proval in the vigilkeeper. The halls of the learning center
were brightly lit, ringing with noise, music practice, chil-
dren's voices. There were all the old sounds, the smells, the
shadows, the echoes of childhood which Shevek remem-
bered, and with them the fears. One forgets the fears.

He came out and walked home with Sadik, his arm
around her thin shoulders. She was silent, still struggling.
She said abruptly as they came to their entry in the Pekesh
main domicile, "I .know it isn't agreeable for you and
Takver to have me overnight."

"Where did you get that idea?"

"Because you want privacy, adult couples need privacy."

There's Pilun," he observed.

"Pilun doesn't count"

Neither do you."

She sniffled, attempting to smile.

When they came into the light of the room, however,
her white, red-patched, puffy face at once startled Takver
into saying, "Whatever is wrong?"—and Pilun, inter-
rupted in sucking, startled out of bliss, began to howl, at
which Sadik broke down again, and for a while it ap-
peared that everyone was crying, and comforting each
other, and refusing comfort. This sorted out quite suddenly
into silence, Pilun on the mother's lap, Sadik on the
father's.

When the baby was replete and put down to sleep,

298

Takver said in a low but impassioned voice, "Nowl What
is it?"

Sadik had gone half to sleep herself, her head on
Shevek's chest. He could feel her gather herself to answer.
He stroked her hair to keep her quiet, and answered for
her. "Some people at the learning center disapprove of us.**

"And by damn what damned right have they to disap-
prove of us?"

"Shh, shh. Of the Syndicate."

"Oh,'* Takver said, a queer guttural noise, and ia but-
toning up her tunic she tore the button right off the fabric.
She stood looking down at it on her palm. Then she
looked at Shevek and Sadik.

"How long has this been going on?"

"A long time," Sadik said, not lilting her head.

''Days, decads, all quarter?"

"Oh, longer. But they get ... they're meaner in the
dorm now. At night Terzol doesnt stop them." Sadik
spoke rather like a sleep-talker, and quite serenely, as if
the matter no longer concerned her.

"What do they do?" Takver asked, though Shevek's
gaze warned her.

"Well, they ... they're just mean. They keep me out of
the games and things. Tip, you know, she was a friend,
she used to come and talk at least after lights out. But she
stopped. Terzol is the big sister in the dorm now, and
she's ... she says, 'Shevek is—Shevek—* **

He broke in, feeling the tension rise in the child's body,
the cowering and the summoning of courage, unendurable.
"She says, 'Shevek is a traitor, Sadik ia an egoizef—You
know what she says, TakverI" His eyes were blazing. Tak-
ver came forward and touched her daughter's cheek, once,
rather timidly. She said in a quiet voice, "Yes, I know,"
and went and sat down on the other bed platform, facing
them.

The baby, tucked away next to the wan, snored slightly.
People in the next room came back from commons, a door
slammed, somebody down in the square called good night
and was answered from an open window. The big domi-
cile, two hundred rooms, was astir, alive quietly all round
them; as their existence entered into its existence so did its
existence enter into theirs, as part of a whole. Presently
Sadik slipped off her father's knees and sat on the plat-
299

form beside him, close to him. Her dark hair waa
rumpled and tangled, hanging around her face.

"I didn't want to tell you, because . . .** Her voice
sounded thin and small. "But it hist keeps getting worse.
They make each other meaner."*

"Then you won't go back there," Shevek said. He put
his arm around her, but she resisted, sitting straight.

"If I go and talk to them—" said Takver.

"It's no use. They feel as they feel."

**But what is this we're up against?*' Takver asked with
bewilderment.

Shevek did not answer. He kept his arm around Sadik,
and she yielded at last, leaning her head against his arm
with a weary heaviness. "There are other learning centers,'*
he said at last, without much certainty.             ,

Takver stood up. She clearly could not sit still and
wanted to do something, to act. But there was not much
to do. "Let me braid your hair, Sadik," she said in a sub-
dued voice.

She brushed and braided the child's hair; they set the
screen across the room, and tucked Sadik in beside the
sleeping baby. Sadik was near tears again saying good
night, but within half an hour they heard by her breathing
that she was asleep.

Shevek had settled down at the head of their bed plat-
form with a notebook and the slate he used for calculat-
ing.

'T paged that manuscript today,*' Takver said.

*'What did it come to?"

**Forty-one pages. With the supplement.**

He nodded. Takver got up, looked over the screen at
the two sleeping children, returned, and sat down on the
edge of the platform.

<<! knew there was something wrong. But she didnt say
anything. She never has, she's stoical. It didn't occur to me
it was this. I thought it was just our problem, it didnt
occur to me they'd take it out on children." She spoke
softly and bitterly. "It grows, it keeps growing. . . . Will
another school be any different?"

"I don't know. If she spends much time with us, prob-
ably not."

"You certainly arent suggesting—**

"No, I'm not I'm stating a fact, only. If we choose to
300

give the chad the intensity of Individual love, we cant
Spare her what comes with that, the risk of pain. Pain
from us, and through u»."

"It isn't fair she should be tormented for what we do.
She's so good, and good-natured, she's like dear water—"
Takver stopped, strangled by a brief rush of tears, wiped
her eyes, set her lips.

**It i&n't what we do. It's what I do.** He put his note-
book down. **You*ve been suffering for it too.**

*•I dont care what they flunk."

"At work?-

1 can take another posting.**

**Not here, not in your own field.'1

*•Well, do you want me to go somewhere else? The Sor-
ruba fishery labs at Peace-and-Plenty would take me on.
But where does that leave you?" She looked at him an-
grily. "Here, I suppose?"

"I could come with TOO. Skovan and the others are
coming along in lotic, theyTl be able to handle the radio,
and that's my main practical function in the Syndicate
now. I can do physics as wen in Peace-and-Plenty as I
can here. But unless I drop right out of the Syndicate of
Initiative, that doesn't solve the problem, does it? I'm the
problem. I'm the one who makes trouble."

**Would they care about that, in a little place like Peaco-
and-Plenty?"

*Tm afraid they might"

**Shev. how much of his hatred have you run up
against? Have you been keeping quiet, like Sadik?"

"And like you. Well, at times. When I went to Concord.
last summer, it was a little worse than I told you. Rock-
throwing, and a good-sized fight The students who asked
me to come had to fifiht for me. They did. too, but I got
out quick; I was putting them in danger. Well, students
want some danger. And after all we've asked for a fight,
we've deliberately roused people. And there are plenty on
our side. But now... but Fm beginning to wonder if Fm
not imperiling you and the children. Tak. By staying with
you."

"Of course you're not in danger yourself," she said
savagely.

"I've asked for it. But it didn't occur to me they'd ex-
301

tend their tribal resentment to you. I dont feel the same
about your danger as I do about mine."
"Altruist!"

"Maybe. I cant help ft. I do feel responsible, Tak.
Without me, you could go anywhere, or stay here. You've
worked for the Syndicate, but what they hold against you
is your loyalty to me. I'm the symbol. So there doesn't...
there isn't anywhere for me to go.**

"Go to Urras,'* Takver said. Her voice was so harsh
that Shevek sat back as if she had hit him in the face.

She did not meet his eyes, but she repeated* more soft-
ly, "Go to Urras. . . . Why not? They want you there.
They don't here! Maybe they*!! begin to see what they've
lost, when you're gone. And you want to go. I saw that
tonight I never thought of it before, but when we talked
about the prize, at dinner, I saw it, the way you laughed.**

*! don't need prizes and rewards!"

"No, but you do need appreciation, and discussion, and
students—with no Salmi-strings attached. And look. You
and Dap keep talking about scaring PDC with the idea of
somebody going to Urras, asserting his right to self-deter-
mination. But if you talk about it and nobody goes, you've
only strengthened their side—you've only proved that
custom is unbreakable. Now you've brought it up in a
PDC meeting, somebody win have to go. It ought to be
you. They've asked you; you have a reason to go. Go get
your reward—the money they're saving for you," she
ended with a sudden quite genuine laugh.

Takver, I dont want to go to Urrasi"

"Yes you do; you know you do. Though I'm not sure
I know why.**

"Weu. of course Fd like to meet some of the physicists.
• . • And see the laboratories at leu Bun where they've
been experimenting with light" He looked shamefaced
as he said it.

"It's your right to do so." Takver said with fierce de-
termination. "H It's part of your work, you ought to do
ft."

"It would help keep the Revolution alive—on both sides
"-wouldnt ft?" he said. **What a crazy idea! Uke Tina's
play. only backwards. I'm to go subvert the archists. . .,
Well, it would at least prove to them that Anarres exists.
302

They taDe with us on the radio, but I dont think they
really believe in us. In what we are."

*'H they did, they might be scared. They might come
and blow us right out of the sky, if you really convinced
them."

"I dont think so. I might make a little revolution in
their physics again, but not in their opinions. It's here.
here, that I can affect society, even though here they wont
pay attention to my physics. You're quite right; now that
we've talked about it, we must do it" There was a pause.
He said. "I wonder what kind of physics the other races

do."

"What other races?"

*The aliens. People from Hain and other solar systems.
There are two alien Embassies on Urras, Hain and Terra.
The Hahnsh invented the interstellar drive Urras uses now.
I suppose they'd give it to us. too, if we were willing to ask
for it It would be interesting to ..." He did not finish.

After another long pause he turned to her and said in a
changed, sarcastic tone, "And what would you do while I
went visiting the propertarians?"

"Go to the Sorruba coast with the girls, and live a very
peaceful life as a fish-lab technician. Until you come
back."

"Come back? Who knows if I could come back?**

She met his gaze straight on. "What would prevent
you?"

"Maybe the UrrastL They might keep me. No one there
is free to come and go, you know. Maybe our own peo-
ple. They might prevent me from landing. Some of them
in PDC threatened that, today. Rulag was one of them."

"She would. She only knows denial. How to deny the
possibility of coming home."

"That is quite true. That says it completely," he said,
settling back again and looking at Takver with contem-
plative admiration. "But Rulag isn't the only one, un-
fortunately. To a great many people, anyone who went to
Urras and tried to come back would simply be a traitor, a
spy."

"What would they actually do about it?"

"Well, if they persuaded Defense of the danger, they
could shoot down the ship."

"Would Defense be that stupid?"
303

"I dont think so. But anybody outside Defense could
make explosives with blasting powder and blow up the
ship on the ground. Or, more likely, attack me once I was
outside the ship. I think that's a definite possibility. It
should be included in a plan to make a round-trip tour of
the scenic areas of Unas."

"Would it be worthwhile to you—that risk?"

He looked forward at nothing for a time. "Yes," he
said, "in a way. If I could finish the theory there, and give
it to them—to us and them and all the worlds, you know
—I'd like that. Here I'm walled in. I'm cramped, it's hard
to work, to test the work, always without equipment,
without colleagues and students. And then when I do the
work, they don't want it. Or, if they do, like Sabul, they
want me to abandon initiative in return for receivmg ap-
proval. They'll use the work I do, after I'm dead, that
always happens. But why must I give my Ufework as a
present to Sabul, all the Sabuls, the petty, scheming,
greedy egos of one single planet? I'd like to share it. It's a
big subject I work on. It ought to be given out, handed
around. It won't run out!"

"AH right, then," Takver said. *'it is worth it"

•'Worth what?"

"The risk. Perhaps not being able to come back."
"Not being able to come back," he repeated. He looked
at Takver with a strange, intense, yet abstracted gaze.

**I think there are more people on our side, on the
Syndicate's side, than we realize. It's just that we haven't
actually done much—done anything to bring them to-
gether—taken any risk. If you took it, I think they'd come
out in support of you. If you opened the door, they'd
smell fresh air again, they'd smell freedom."

"And they might all come rushing to slam the door
shut."

"If they do, too bad for them. The Syndicate can pro-
tect you when you land. And then, if people are still so
hostile and hateful, we'll say the hell with them. What's
the good of an anarchist society that's afraid of anarchists?
We'll go live in Lonesome, in Upper Sedep, in Uttermost,
we'll go live alone in the mountains if we have to. There's
room. There'd be people who'd come with us. We'll make
a new community. If our society is settling down into
politics and power seeking, then well get out, well go
304

make an Anarres beyond Anarrea, a new beginning. How's

that?"

"Beautiful" he said, "it's beautiful, dear heart. But I'm
not going to go to Urras, you know."

"Ob, yes. And you will come back," Takver said. Her
eyes were very dark, a soft darkness, like the darkness of
a forest at night. "K you set out to. You always get to
where you're going. And you always come back."

"Don't be stupid, Takver. Fm not going to Urras!"

"Fm worn out," Takver said, stretching, and leaning
over to put her forehead against his arm. "Let's go to
bed."

305

Chapter 15







Before they broke orbit, the view ports were filled with
the cloudy turquoise of Unas, immense and beautiful. But
the ship turned, and the stars came into sight, and Anarres
among them like a round bright rock: moving yet not
moving, thrown by what hand, tunelessly circling, creating
time.

They showed Shevek all over the ship, the interstellar
Davenant. It was as different as it could be from the
freighter Mindful From the outside it was as bizarre and
fragile-looking as a sculpture in glass and wire; it did not
have the look of a ship, a vehicle, about it at all, not even
a front and back end, for it never traveled through any
atmosphere thicker than that of interplanetary space. In-
side, it was as spacious and solid as a house. The rooms
were large and private, the walls wood-paneled or cov-
ered with textured weavings, the ceilings high. Only it was
like a house with the blinds drawn, for few rooms had
view ports, and it was very quiet. Even the bridge and the
engine rooms had this quietness about them, and the
machines and instruments had the simple definitiveness of
design of the fittings of a sailing ship. For recreation,
there was a garden, where the lighting had the quality of
306

sunlight, and the air was sweet with the smell of earth
and leaves; during ship night the garden was darkened,
and its ports cleared to the stars.

Though its interstellar journeys lasted only a few hours
or days shiptime, a near-lightspeed ship such as this might
spend months exploring a solar system, or years in orbit
around a planet where its crew was living or exploring.
Therefore it was made spacious, humane, livable, for those
who must live aboard it. Its style had neither the opulence
of Urras nor the austerity of Anarres, but struck a bal-
ance, with the effortless grace of long practice. One could
imagine leading that restricted life without fretting at its
restrictions, contentedly, meditatively. They were a medi-
tative people, the Hainish among the crew, civil, con-
siderate, rather somber. There was little spontaneity in
them. The youngest of them seemed older than any of the
Terrans aboard.

But Shevek was seldom very observant of them, Ter-
rans or Hainish, during the three days that the Davenant,
moving by chemical propulsion at conventional speeds,
took to go from Urras to Anarres. He replied when spo-
ken to; he answered questions willingly, but he asked very
few. When he spoke, it was out of an inward silence. The
people of the Davenant, particularly the younger ones,
were drawn to him, as if he had something they lacked
or was something they wished to be. They discussed him a
good deal among themselves, but they were shy with him.
He did not notice this. He was scarcely aware of them. He
was aware of Anarres, ahead of him. He was aware of
hope deceived and of the promise kept; of failure; and of
the sources within his spirit, unsealed at last, of joy. He
was a man released from jail, going home to his family.
Whatever such a man sees along his way he sees only as
reflections of the light

On the second day of the voyage he was in the com-
munications room, talking with Anarres on the radio, first
on the PDC wave length and now with the Syndicate of
Initiative. He sat leaning forward, listening, or answering
-with a spate of the clear, expressive language that was his
native tongue, sometimes gesturing with his free hand as
if his interlocutor could see him, occasionally laughing.
The first mate of the Davenant, a Hainishman named
Ketho, controlling the radio contact, watched him
307

thoughtfully. Ketho tad spent an hour after dinner the
night before with Shevek, along with the commander and
other crew members; he had asked—in a quiet, unde-
manding, Hainish way—a good many questions about
Anarrea.

Shevek turned to him at last "AH right, done. The rest
can wait till Fm home. Tomorrow they will contact you
to arrange the entry procedure.'*

Ketho nodded. "You got some good news,** he said.

**Yes, I did. At least some, what do you call it, lively
news." They had to speak lotic together; Shevek was more
fluent in the language than Ketho, who spoke it very cor-
rectly and stiffly. The landing is going to be exciting,"
Shevek went on. "A lot of enemies and a lot of friends
will be there. The good news is the friends. ... It seems
there are more of them than when I left."

'This danger of attack, when you land,** Ketho said.
"Surety the officers of the Port of Anarres feel that they
can control the dissidents? They would not deliberately
tell you to come down and be murdered?"

"Wefl. they are going to protect me. But I am also a
dissident, after alL I asked to take. the risk. That's my
privilege, you see. as an Odonian." He smiled at Ketho.
The Hainishman did not smile back; his face was serious.
He was a handsome man of about thirty, tall and light-
skinned like a Cetian, but nearly hairless like a Terran,
with very strong, fine features.

"I am glad to be able to share it with you," he said. "I
will be taking you down in the landing craft"

"Good," Shevek said. "It isn't everyone who would care
to accept our privuegesi"

"More than you think, perhaps,** Ketbo said. **If you
would allow them to."

Shevek, whose mind had not been fully on the conver-
sation, had been about to leave; this stopped him. He
looked at Ketho, and after a moment said, **Do you mean
that you would like to land witk me?"

The Hainishman answered with equal directness, "Yes,
I would."

"Would the commander permit it?"

"Yes. As an officer of a mission ship, in fact, it is part of
my duty to explore and investigate a new world when
possible. The commander and I have spoken of the pos-
308

sibility. We discussed it with our ambassadors before we
left. Their feeling was that no formal request should be
made, since your peopled policy is to forbid foreigners to
land."

*'Hm," Shevek said, noncommittal. He went over to the
far wall and stood for a while in front of a picture, a
Hainish landscape, very simple and subtle, a dark river
flowing among reeds under a heavy sky. "The Terms of
the Closure of the Settlement of Anarres," he said, "do
not permit Urrasti to land, except inside the boundary of
the Port. Those terms still are accepted. But you're not an
Urrasti."

"When Anarres was settled, there were no other races
known. By implication, those terms include all foreigners.*'

"So our managers decided, sixty years ago, when your
people first came into this solar system and tried to talk
with us. But I think they were wrong. They were just
building more walls." He turned around and stood, his
hands behind his back, looking at the other man. "Why do
you want to land, Ketho?"

"I want to see Anarres,** the Hainishman said. "Even
before you came to Urras, I was curious about it. It be-
gan when I read Odo's works. I became very interested. I
have—" He hesitated, as if embarrassed, but continued in
his repressed, conscientious way, "I have learned a little
Pravic. Not much yet"

"It is your own wish. then—your own initiative?"

"Entirely."

"And you understand that it might be dangerous?"

"Yes."

"Things are ... a little broken loose, on Anarres. That's
what my friends on the radio have been telling me about.
It was our purpose all along—our Syndicate, this journey
of mine—to shake up things, to stir up, to break some
habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like
anarchistsl All this has been going on while I was gone.
So, you see, nobody is quite sure what happens next. And
if you land with me, even more gets broken loose. I can-
not push too far. I cannot take you as an official represen-
tative of some foreign government That will not do, on
Anarres."

"I understand that."

"Once you are there, once you walk through the wall

309

with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are re-
sponsible to you and you to us; you become aa Anarresti,
with the same options as all die others. But they are not
safe options. Freedom is never very safe." He looked
around the tranquil, orderly room, with its simple consoles
and delicate instruments, its high ceiling and windowless
walls, and back at Ketho. *'You would find yourself very
much alone," he said.

**My race is very old," Ketho said. "We have been
civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of
hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything.
Anarchism, with the rest. But i have not tried it. They
say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is
not new, each single life, then why are we born?"

"We are the children of time," Shevek said, in Pravic.
The younger man looked at him a moment, and then re-
peated the words in lotic: "We are the children of time."

**AU right." Shevek said, and laughed. "All right, am-
marl You had better call Anarres on the radio again—the
Syndicate, first ... I said to Keng, the ambassador, that
I had nothing to give in return for what her people and
yours have done for me; well, maybe I can give you some-
thing in return. An idea, a promise, a risk...."

"I shall speak to the commander," Ketho said, as grave
as ever, but with a very slight tremor in his voice of ex-
citement, of hope.

Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the
Davenanfs garden. The lights were out, there, and it was
illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A
night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had
opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its
perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract
some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a gar-
den on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ,
but there is only one darkness. Shevek stood at the high,
cleared view port, looking at the night side of Anarres, a
dark curve across half the stars. He was wondering if
Takver would be there, at the Port. She had not yet ar-
rived in Abbenay from Peace-and-Plenty when he last
talked with Bedap, so he had left it to Bedap to discuss
and decide with her whether it would be wise for her to
come out to the Port. ''You don't think I could stop her
even if it wasn't?" Bedap had said. He wondered also what
310

kind of ride she might have got from the Sorruba coast; a
dirigible, he hoped, if she had brought the girls along.
Train riding was hard, with children. He still recalled the
discomforts of the trip from Chakar to Abbenay, in '68,
when Sadik had been trainsick for three mortal days.

The door of the garden room opened, increasing the
dim illumination. The commander of the Davenant looked
in and spoke his name; he answered; the commander came
in, with Ketho.

*'We have the entry pattern for our landing craft from
your ground control,'* the commander said. He was a
short, iron-colored Terran, cool and businesslike. "If
you're ready to go, we'll start launch procedure."

"Yes."

The commander nodded and left. Ketho came forward
to stand beside Shevek at the port.

'•You're sure you want to walk through this wall with
me, Ketho? You know, for me, it's easy. Whatever hap-
pens, I am coming home. But you are leaving home.
True Journey is return. ...'**

"I hope to return," Ketbo said in his quiet voice. "In
time."

•'When are we to enter the landing craft?"

"In about twenty minutes."

"I'm ready. I have nothing to pack." Shevek laughed, a
laugh of clear, unmixed happiness. The other roan looked
at him gravely, as if he was not sure what happiness was,
and yet recognized or perhaps remembered it from afar.
He stood beside Shevefc as if there was something he
wanted to ask him. But he did not ask it "It will be early
morning at Anarres Port," he said at last, and took his
leave, to get his things and meet Shevek at the launch
port

Alone, Shevek turned back to the observation port, and
saw the blinding curve of sunrise over the Temae, just
coming into sight

"I will lie down to sleep on Anarres tonight," he
thought. "I will lie down beside Takver. I wish I'd brought
the picture, the baby sheep, to give Pilun,"

But he had not brought anything. His hands were emp-
ty, as they had always been.

311