The Dispossesed

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

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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-

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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 approves 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"

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''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 Harmonies, 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 Simultaneity, 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

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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 fundamental, 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. Anyhow 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

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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.

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"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 Simultaneity, 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 laughing 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

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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 metacosmology 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 shockingly 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. Unfortunately 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

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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 statistic, 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 opening 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 controlled, pleasant voice, "Well, yes; it mattered, and it still

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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 something 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?"

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"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.

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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 organized 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 anarchists?" he said. "What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom 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

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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 personality, 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 question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation 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 wishing 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

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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 democracy 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 whatever 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 professors, 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 professors 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

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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 advantage 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 direction- 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 became 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 International 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

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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 helftook-ing. The simplicity of his old suit made it positively, ostentatious, and his soft, crude desert boots appeared very odd indeed among the lotis' fanciful footgear. So at his request 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 afternoon 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, colanders, 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 excrement. 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

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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 workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, 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 determined 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 someone 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 beautiful and disheveled, gold leaves flaring and blowing on

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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 prejudices, 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 expedition, 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 detachment. 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 sunshine, with enjoyment.

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

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"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 serenity; the lamps on the long reading tables were plain spheres of alabaster. No one else was there, but an attendant hastened in behind them to light the fire laid on the marble hearth and to make sure they wanted nothing before 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 intelligent 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 starving 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 social cooperation, mutual aid, when it is the only means of staying alive?"

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

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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 revolutionary 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 expression 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; anyhow 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 ornate, gold-inlaid mantelpiece. "Pae is a pretty good physicist. And very obliging. But I don't trust him."

"Why not?"

"Well... he evades."

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"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 individuals."

While Chifoilisk spoke, Shevek's relaxed posture had stiffened; he now stood straight, like Chifoilisk, looking 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, '^Aes," 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

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back the revolution, the old one, the real one, the revolution for justice which you began and then stopped halfway. 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 without 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. Because the highest cause I can ever serve is the strength and welfare of my country."

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'*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 Shevek'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 ensuing victory of the Simultaneists. That battle had been

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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 acft 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 country 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 anyone 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 flowers, 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-moving 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 remember 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-

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tains while mine were oppressing serfs in Sie, a few centuries 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 arrangement 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 Number, 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 getting 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 existence 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

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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

•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 mastered 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 superiority 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 noblemen, 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 going to get to the real thing?"

"You know that the means are the end, to us Odonians," Shevek said lightly. "Besides, I can't very well present 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

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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, laboratories. .. .*'

The next day One rather stiffly asked Shevek if he would come to dinner and stay overnight, the next weekend, 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 furniture 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 conflict with an impulse toward display—conspicuous ex-

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pense. The natural, aesthetic origin of the desire to own things was concealed and perverted by economic and competitive 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 wonder 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. Looking 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

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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 reprove 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," Shevek 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 country."

"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

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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 entranced by his description of a curriculum that included fanning, carpentry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, roadmending, playwriting, and all the other occupations 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 processing," 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 committee 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

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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 Division 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 reasons. You know, life on Anarres isn't rich, as it is here.

In the little communities there isn't very much entertainment, 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 challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, 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 cooperate?"

"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

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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 companies 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 allowed 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

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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 delight a cutting edge. He did not think consciously of Takver 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 overheating of rooms at the University, and quite plain: the bedstead, bookcases, a chest, a chair, and a painted wooden 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-

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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.

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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 Institute domicile, for a year, without ever saying a full sentence 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 telegraphic 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

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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 between 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. Sequency. 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 volunteered for committee work in the Institute domicile management. He attended meetings of the Physics Federation 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

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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, partly 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 consistent 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-improvised 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 isolation 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 acquaintances if possible, without if need be. The music was a more urgent need, a deeper satisfaction, than the companionship.

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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 because 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 towards them, the kindly young souls who called him brother, 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 mathematics, convincing himself that he needed them and refusing 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.

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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 biographical preface to An's Geometries of Time. Other letters, 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 syndicates, 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, approved 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 anyhow, 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 attached 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?"

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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 someone 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-written, 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 joyful, worked day and night, foamed out ideas like a fountain. 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

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book, appropriated by Sabul; five or six unpublished papers; 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 overwhelmed 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, chasing 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

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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 privacy. 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 incompetence."

"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, sensitive fingertips.

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"No good," said Shevek, sitting down on the bed platform. "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 nothing, 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."

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"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 publishing, 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 opinion! 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 seriously 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 bureaucracy."

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

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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 strangled 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 society that frustrates individual creativity. It's the poverty of Anarres- This planet wasn't meant to support civilization. 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 cooperation become obedience. On Urras they have government by the minority. Here we have government by the majority. 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,

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na!ve. And it's not just PDC. It's anywhere on Anarrea. Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, canneries, agricultural development and research stations, factories, one-product communities—anywhere that function 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 dominance 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, moralistic, 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 accusation.

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 power 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 Nobody 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 meeting, and if he's an interested syndic, he can debate and

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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, loosening 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 anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one.

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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 quitting 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 murderers 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."

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"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 blanket, 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 struggled 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, dreaming. The other one reached his arm out sleepily, muttering reassurance, and the blind warm weight of his touch outweighed 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 reconfirm 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

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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 frequently 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 subatomic velocities. It was a well-trodden field, and his belated 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 students. 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 disaffected 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 independence of mind more interesting. They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming ec-

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centric. Some of them were intellectual nuchnibi who had not worked on a regular posting for years. Shevek disapproved 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 intelligent 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 instrument, 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 assumed 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 performer."

"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 chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity

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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 because 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 utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention 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

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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 complained 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 before 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

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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 speaking.

"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

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what she ought to tell him remained unsaid for quite a while. He looked at her at last with such pleading apprehension that she hastened to speak, and said in a rush, "Well, all I mean is, I don't want to copulate with you

file:///F|/rah/Ursula%20LeGum/LeGum,%20Ursula%20K%20-%20The%20Dispossessed.txt 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 disharmonies.

"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

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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, hugging 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 noticed 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

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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 matter, 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 mountains, 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;

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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 beginning their partnership. Then she went to her old dormitory, 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 ceiling, 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, because they had led up to it, prepared him for it. Everything that had happened to him was part of what was happening to him now, Takver saw no such obscure concatenations 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

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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 scarcely 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 harvest 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 harvest. He's so delicate you'd think he was a fish egg! Has he ever touched dirt?" Takver was not particularly charitable, and she had a hot temper.

She had studied biology at Northsetting Regional Institute, 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 increasing 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

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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 forward 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 connected 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 exuberance 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 cultivated, 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

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of the fish tanks, "because it's so complex, a real web.

This fish eats that fish eats small fry eat ciliates eat bacteria 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 unnaturally 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 syndicate or coordinating federative, on whichever level cooperation 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

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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 companionship 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

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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 buttons, 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 beside 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-

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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.

file:///F|/rah/Ursula%20LeGuin/LeGuin,%20Ursula%20K%20-%20The%20Dispossessed.txt "Brother, dear soul, hush."

They slept in each other's amis that night, many nights.

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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 repression 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

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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

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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 hopelessness 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. Shevek had never seen a snowfall of more than an inch or so. The extravagance, the sheer quantity, of the storm exhilarated 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

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otter playing. The otter had made himself a snowslide down one wall of the snow castle and was excitedly tobogganing 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^A 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 combine 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

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train after dinner, she had merely come out for the day and he would never see her again.

Oiie had a cold, Sewa was busy with the children.

"Shevek, do you think you might walk Vea to the station?"

"Good Lord, Demaerel Don't make the poor man protect me! You don't think there'll be wolves, do you? 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."

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"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, perhaps 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 people, 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.

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"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 question 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,

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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. Goodbye, Shevek." She put her gloved hand on his for a moment 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 unstable 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-

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tatorship, run by generals. It was a large country in the western hemisphere, mountains and arid savannahs, underpopulated, 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 function 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 traditionally 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 ambassador to the CWG announce that A-Io, rising to the support of the democratic government of Benbili, was sending armed reinforcements to President-General Havevert.

The Benbfli revolutionaries were mostly not even armed.

The loti troops would come with guns, armored cars, airplanes, bombs. Shevek read the description of their equipment 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

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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 concerned 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 remained: 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

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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 numerous Urrasti pockets. He never left his desk computer without 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 admitted 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 wronger. 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. Mathematicians 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

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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, pouring 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 protective 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 suddenly 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 infant 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, heavynecked, stood potent as a thundercloud, charged with generation. Gulls swept over brimming ponds, white over

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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 unjust 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 entirely in the roaring darkness of an underground approach, twenty tracks together, and then released it and its passengers 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? Whatever 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

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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 sunlight 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 station 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 photographs, 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, kicking 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 denominations 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 postcards 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

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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 museum. 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 before 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, ^Aes, 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 invitations 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*

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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 confections. 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-

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colored paper, and tied it with green velvet ribbon. In all her deft movements a humorous and sympathetic complicity 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 fortunately 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 weapon in a power struggle with men. To look at her, Vea was the body profiteer to end them all. Shoes, clothes, cosmetics, jewels, gestures, everything about her asserted provocation. She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a

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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 bottom!"

"That is not so," he protested. He knew she was playing, 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."

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"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, decisions. 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 perfectly 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 realization that he might really have hurt her. He could still feel the brief touch of her hand on his lips. "1 am sorry!" he said.

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"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 brothers 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 anything you aren't?'*

"A salesman,'* he said. *

She studied him, smiling. There was something professional, 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

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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 people 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 happen 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 copulation. 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 allurements, displayed such sensitivity to open talk about anything 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

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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 religion. 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.

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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 strongest 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-

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ently it became more entertaining. Discussions and arguments 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 managed to evade him for a while, for he found it hard to talk physics with nonphysicists. The other was overbearing, 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 money. "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 mildness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby, turn around to listen. "Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically 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 Shevek 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 reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between 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.

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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 successively," Shevek said. "Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?"

He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered 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 understand 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 together. 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 unconscious 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

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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 system 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 timelessnesses 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,

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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 relieved 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 behavior."