The Dispossesed

"Why not?" said Dearri.

Shevek ignored him. "But it's true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby. again, the animal, they don't see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it.

They can't make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly."

"But look here," said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, "you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the book that's already written? All you can do is read it There's no choice, no freedom of action left."

'That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite

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right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture—you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has alreadyJ^it the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So wmch do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both."

"How—how do you reconcile them?" the shy man asked earnestly.

Shevek nearly laughed in despair. "I don't know. I have been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don't want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question. ..."

"All very well, but what industry needs is answers," said Deani.

Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said nothing at all.

There was a heavy silence, into which Vea leapt, graceful and inconsequential, returning to her theme of foreseeing the future. Others were drawn in by this topic, and they all began telling their experiences with fortunetellers Mid clairvoyants.

Shevek resolved to say nothing more, no matter what he was asked. He was thirstier than ever; be let the waiter refill his glass, and drank the pleasant, fizzy stuff. He looked around the room, trying to dissipate his anger and tension in watching other people. But they were also behaving very emotionally, for loti—shouting, laughing loudly, interrupting each other. One pair was indulging in sexual foreplay in a comer. Shevek looked away, disgusted.

Did they egoize even in sex? To caress and copulate in front of unpaired people was as vulgar as to eat in front of hungry people. He returned his attention to the group around him. They were off prediction, now, and onto politics. They were all disputing about the war, about

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what Thu would do next, what A-Io would do next, what the CWG would do next.

"Why do you talk only in abstractions?" he inquired suddenly, wondering as he spoke why he was speaking, when he had resolved not to. "It is not names of countries, it is people killing each other. Why do the soldiers go? Why does a man go kill strangers?" "But that's what soldiers are for," said a little fair woman with an opal in her navel. Several men began to explain the principle of national sovereignty to Shevek.

Vea interrupted, "But let him talk. How would you solve the mess, Shevek?"

"Solution's in plain sight."

'•Where?"

"Anarres!"

"But what you people do on the Moon doesnt solve our problems here."

"Man's problem is all the same. Survival. Species, group, individual."

"National self-defense—" somebody shouted.

They argued, he argued. He knew what he wanted to say, and knew it must convince everyone because it was clear and true, but somehow he could not get it said properly. Everybody shouted. The little fair woman patted the broad arm of the chair she was sitting in, and be sat down on it. Her shaven, silken head came peering up under his arm. "Hello, Moon Man!" she said. Vea had joined another group for a time, but now was back near him. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked large and liquid. He thought he saw Pae across the room, but there were so many faces that they blurred together.

Things happened in fits and starts, with blanks in between, as if he were being allowed to witness the operation of the Cyclic Cosmos of old Gvarab's hypothesis from behind the scenes. "The principle of legal authority must be upheld, or we'll degenerate into mere anarchy'" thundered a fat, frowning man. Shevek said, "Yes, yes, degenerate!

We have enjoyed it for one hundred and fifty years now."

The little fair woman's toes, in silver sandals, peeped out from under her skirt, which was sewn all over with hundreds and hundreds of tiny pearls. Vea said, "But tell us about Anarres—what's it really like? Is it so wonderful there really?"

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He was sitting on the arm of the chair, and Vea was curled up on the hassock at his knees, erect and supple, her soft breasts staring at him with their blind eyes, her face smiling, complacent, flushed. *

Something dark turned over in Shevek's mind, darkening everything. His mouth was dry. He finished the glassful the waiter had just poured him. "I don't know," he said; his tongue felt half paralyzed. "No. It is not wonderfuL It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dust and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren't beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that.

The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can't always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn't enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful, here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit Because our men and women are free— possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison.

It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the walll"

They were all looking at him.

He heard the loudness of his voice still ringing in the silence, felt his ears burning. The darkness, the blankness, turned over once more in his mind. "I feel dizzy," he said, and stood up.

Vea was at his arm. "Come along this way," she said, laughing a little and breathless. He followed her as she threaded her way through the people. He now felt his face was very pale, and the dizziness did not pass; he hoped she was taking him to the washroom, or to a window where he could breathe fresh air. But the room they came into was large and dimly lit by reflection. A high, white bed bulked against the wall; a looking-glass covered half an-

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other wall. There was a close, sweet fragrance of draperies, linens, the perfume Vea used.

''You are too much," Vea said. bringing herself directly before him and looking up into his face, in the dimness, with that breathless laugh. "Really too much—you are impossible—magnificent!" She put her hands on his shoulders. "Oh, the looks on their faces! I've got to kiss you for that!" And she lifted herself on tiptoe, presenting him her mouth, and her white throat, and her naked breasts.

He took hold of her and kissed her mouth, forcing her head backward, and then her throat and breasts. She yielded at first as if she had no bones, then she writhed a little, laughing and pushing weakly at him, and began to talk. "Oh, no, no, now behave," she said. *'NoWt come on, we do have to go back to the party. No, Saevek, now calm down, this won't do at all!" He paid no attention. He pulled her with him toward the bed, and she came, though she kept talking. He fumbled with one hand at the complicated clothes he was wearing and managed to get his trousers unfastened. Then there was Vea's clothing, the lowslung but tight-fitted skirt band, which he could not loosen. "Now, stop,'* she said. "No, now listen, Shevek, it won't do, not now. I haven't taken a contraceptive, if I got stuffed I'd be in a pretty mess, my husband's coming back in two weeksl No, let me be," but he could not let her be; his face was pressed against her soft, sweaty, scented flesh. "Listen, don't mess up my clothes, people will notice, for heaven's sake. Wait—just wait, we can arrange it, we can fix up a place to meet, I do have to be careful of my reputation, I can't trust the maid. Just wait, not now—Not nowl Not now!" Frightened at last by his blind urgency, his force, she pushed at him as hard as she could, her hands against his chest He took a step backward, confused by her sudden high tone of fear and her struggle; but he could not stop, her resistance excited him further. He gripped her to him, and his semen spurted out against the white silk of her dress.

"Let me gol Let me gol" she was repeating in the !same high whisper. He let her go. He stood dazed. He fumbled at his trousers, trying to dose them. "I am— sorry—I thought you wanted—"

"For God's sakel" Vea said, looking down at her

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skirt in the dim light, twitching the pleats away from her. *'Really! Now 111 have to change my dress.'*

Shevek stood, his mouth open, breathing with difficulty, his hands hanging; then all at once be turned and blundered out of the dim room. Back in the bright room of the party he stumbled through the crowded people, tripped over a leg, found his way blocked by bodies, clothes, jewels, breasts, eyes, candle flames, furniture. He ran up against a table. On it lay a silver platter on which tiny pastries stuffed with meat, cream, and herbs were arranged in concentric circles like a huge pale flower. Shevek gasped for breath, doubled up, and vomited all over the platter.

*TU take him home," Pae said.

"Do, for heaven's sake," said Vea. *'Were you looking for him, Saio?"

"Oh, a bit. Fortunately Demaere called you."

*ou are certainly welcome to him."

"He won't be any trouble. Passed out in the halL May I use your phone before I go?"

"Give my love to the Chief," Vea said archly.

Oiie had come to his sister's fiat with Pae, and left with him. They sat in the middle seat of the big Government limousine that Pae always had on call, the same one that had brought Shevek from the space port last summer. He now lay as they had dumped him on the back seat.

"Was he with your sister all day, Demaere?"

"Since noon, apparently."

Thank Godi"

"Why are you so worried about his getting into the slums? Any Odonian's already convinced we're a lot of oppressed wage slaves, what's the difference if he sees a bit

of corroboration?"

"I don't care what he sees. We dont want him seen.

Have you been reading the birdseed papers? Or the broadsheets that were circulating last week in Old Town, about the 'Forerunner'? The myth—the one who comes before the millennium—*a stranger, an outcast, an exile, bearing in empty hands the time to come.' They quoted that. The rabble are in one of their damned apocalyptic moods.

Looking for a figurehead. A catalyst. Talking about a general strike. They'll never learn. They need a lesson all the

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aame. Damned rebellious cattle, send them to fight Thu. it's the only good we'll ever get from them."

Neither man spoke again during the ride.

The night watchman of the Senior Faculty House helped them get Shevek up to his room. They loaded him onto the bed. He began to snore at once.

Oiie stayed to take off Shevek's shoes and put a blanket over him. The drunken man's breath was foul; Oiie stepped away from the bed, the fear and the love he felt for Shevek rising up in him, each strangling the other. He Sscowled, and muttered, "Dirty fool." He snapped the light off and returned to the other room. Pae was standing at the desk going through Shevek's papers.

"Leave off," Oiie said, his expression of disgust deepening. "Come on. It's two in the morning. I'm tired."

"What has the bastard been doing, Demaere? Still nothing here, absolutely nothing. Is he a complete fraud? Have •we been taken in by a damned mdve peasant from Utopia? Where's his theory? Where's our instantaneous spaceflight? Where's our advantage over the Hainish? Nine, ten months we've been feeding the bastard, for nothing!" Nevertheless he pocketed one of the papers before he followed Oiie to the door.

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Chapter 8 ^iKKRfi^

They were out on the athletic fields of Abbenay*s North Park, six of them, in the long gold and heat and dust of the evening. They were all pleasantly replete, for dinner had gone on most of the afternoon, a street festival and feast with cooking over open fires. It was the midsummer holiday. Insurrection Day, commemorating the first great uprising in Nio Bsseia in the Urrasti year 740, nearly two hundred years ago. Cooks and refectory workers were honored as the guests of the rest of the community on that day, because a syndicate of cooks and waiters had begun the strike that led to the insurrection. There were many such traditions and festivals on Anarres, some instituted by the Settlers and others, like the harvest homes and the Feast of the Solstice, that had risen spontaneously out of the rhythms of life on the planet and the need of those who work; together to celebrate together.

They were talking, all rather desultorily except for Tak-ver. She had danced for hours, eaten quantities of fried bread and pickles, and was feeling very lively. •'Why did Kvigot get posted to the Keran Sea fisheries, where he'll have to start all over again, while Turib takes on his research program here?" she was saying. Her research syndicate had been assimilated into a project managed directly

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by PDC, and she had become a strong partisan of some of Bedap's ideas. "Because Kvigot is a good biologist who doesnt agree with Simas's fuddy-duddy theories, and Turib is a nothing who scrubs Simas's back in the baths. See who takes over directing the program when Simas retires. s She will, Turib will, Fll bet you!"

"What does that expression mean?" asked somebody who felt indisposed for social criticism.

Bedap, who had been putting on weight at the waist and was serious about exercise, was trotting earnestly around the playing field. The others were sitting on a dusty bank under trees, getting their exercise verbally.

"It's an lotic verb," Shevek said. "A game the Urrasti play with probabilities. The one who guesses right gets the other one's property." He had long ago ceased to observe -Sabul's ban on mentioning his lotic studies.

"How did one of their words get into Pravic?"

"The Settlers," said another. "They had to leam Pravic as adults; they must have thought in the old languages for a long time. I read somewhere that the word damn isn't in the Pravic Dictionary—it's lotic too. Farigv didnt provide any swearwords when he invented the language, or if be did his computers didnt understand the necessity."

"What's hell, then?" Takver asked. *T used to think it meant the shit depot in the town where I grew up. *Go to hell!' The worst place to go."

Desar, the mathematician, who had now taken a permanent posting to the Institute staff, and who still hung around Shevek, though he seldom spoke to Takver, said in his cryptographic style, "Means Urras."

"On Unas, it means the place you go to when you're damned."

'That's a posting to Southwest in summer," said Terms, an ecologist, an old friend of Takver's.

"It's in the religious mode, in lotic."

"I know you have to read lotic, Shev, but do you have to read religion?"

"Some of the old Urrasti physics is all in the religious mode. Concepts like that come up. 'Hell' means the place of absolute evil."

"The manure depot in Round Valley," Takver said. "I thought so."

Bedap came pumping up, dust-whitened, sweat"

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streaked. He sat down heavily beside Shevek and panted*

"Say something in lotic," asked Richat, a student of Shevek's. •'What does it sound like?" *

"You know: Hell! Damn!"

"But stop swearing at me," said the girl, giggling, and say a whole sentence."

Shevek good-naturedly said a sentence in lotic. "I don't really know how it's pronounced," he added, "I just guess."

"What did it mean?"

"// the passage of time ts a feature of human consciousness, past and future are functions of the mind.

From a pre-Sequentist, Keremcho."

"How weird to think of people speaking and you couldn't understand them!"

"They can't even understand each other. They speak hundreds of different languages, all the crazy archists on the Moon.... "

"Water, water," said Bedap, still panting.

"There is no water," said Terrus. "It hasnt rained for eighteen decads. A hundred and eighty-three days to be precise. Longest drought in Abbenay for forty years."

"If it goes on, well have to recycle urine, the way they did in the Year 20. Glass of piss, Shev?"

"Dont joke," said Terrus. "That's the thread we walk

on. Will it rain enough? The leaf crops in Southrising are a

dead loss already. No rain there for thirty decads."

They all looked up into the hazy, golden sky. The serrated leaves of the trees under which they sat, tall exotica from the Old World, drooped on their branches, dusty, curled by the dryness.

"Never be another Great Drought," Desar said,

"Modem desalinization plants. Prevent."

"They might help alleviate it," Terrus said.

Winter that year came early, cold, and dry in the Northern Hemisphere. Frozen dust on the wind in the low,

wide streets of Abbenay. Water to the baths strictly rationed: thirst and hunger outranked cleanliness. Food and clothing for the twenty million people of Anarres came from the holum plants, leaf, seed, fiber, root. There was some stockpile of textiles in the warehouses and depots, but there had never been much reserve of food. Water went to

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the land, to keep the plants alive. The sky over the city was

cloudless and would have been clear, but it was yellowed

with dust windbome from drier lands to the south and

west Sometimes when the wind blew down from the

north, from the Ne Theras, the yellow haze cleared and

left a brilliant, empty sky, dark blue hardening to purple

at the zenith.

Takver was pregnant Mostly she was sleepy and benign. "I am a fish," she said, "a fish in water. I am inside the baby inside me." But at times she was overtaxed by her work, or left hungry by the slightly decreased meals at commons. Pregnant women, like children and old people, could get a light extra meal daily, lunch at eleven, but she often missed this because of the exacting schedule of her work. She could miss a meal, but the fish in her laboratory tanks could not. Friends often brought by something saved out from their dinner or left over at their commons, a filled bun or a piece of fruit. She ate all gratefully but continued to crave sweets, and sweets were in short supply. When she was tired she was anxious and easily upset, and her temper flared at a word.

Late in the autumn Shevek completed the manuscript of the Principles of Simultaneity. He gave it to Sabul for approval for the press. Sabul kept it for a decad, two decads, three decads, and said nothing about it. Shevek asked him about it. He replied that he had not yet got around to reading it, he was too busy. Shevek waited. It was midwinter. The dry wind blew day after day; the ground was frozen. Everything seemed to have come to a halt. an uneasy halt, waiting for rain, for birth.

The room was dark. The lights had just come on in the city; they looked weak under the high, dark-grey sky.

Takver came in, lit the lamp, crouched down in her overcoat by the heat grating. "Oh it's cold! Awful. My feet feel like Fve been walking on glaciers, I nearly cried on the way home they hurt so. Rotten profiteering boots' Why can't we make a decent pair of boots? What are you sitting in the dark for?"

"I don't know."

"Did you go to commons? I got a bite at Surplus on the way home. I had to stay, the kukuri eggs were hatching and we had to get the fry out of the tanks before the adults ate them. Did you eat?"

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"No."

"Don't be sulky. Please don't be sulky tonight If one more thing goes wrong, I'll cry. I'm sick of crying alWhe

time. Damned stupid hormones! I wish I could have babies like the fish, lay the eggs and swim off and that's the end of it. Unless I swam back and ate them. .. . Don't sit and look like a statue like that. I just can't stand it.'* She was slightly in tears, as she crouched by the breath of heat from the grating, trying to unfasten her boots with stiff fingers.

Shevek said nothing.

"What is it? You can't just sit there!"

"Sabul called me in today. He won't recommend the Principles for publication, or export."

Takver stopped struggling with the bootlace and sat still. She looked at Shevek over her shoulder. At last she said, "What did he say exactly?"

"The critique he wrote is on the table."

She got up, shuffled over to the table wearing one boot, and read the paper, leaning over the table, her hands in her coat pockets.

" That Sequency Physics is the highroad of chronpsoph-ical thought in the Odonian Society has been a mutually agreed principle since the Settlement of Anarres. Egoistic divagation from this solidarity of principle can result only in sterile spinning of impractical hypotheses without social organic utility, or repetition of the superstitious-religious speculations of the irresponsible hired scientists of the Profit States of Urras. . . .* Oh, the profiteer! The petty-minded, envious little Odo-spouter! Will he send this critique to the Press?"

"He's done so."

She knelt to wrestle off her boots. She glanced up several times at Shevek, but she did not go to him or try to touch him, and for some while she did not say anything. When she spoke her voice was not loud and strained as before, but had its natural husky, furry quality. "What will you do, Shev?"

"There's nothing to do."

*'We'll print the book. Form a printing syndicate, leam to set type, and do it."

"Paper's at minimum ration. No nonessential printing.

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Only PDC publications, tffl the tree-holum plantations are safe."

"Then can you change the presentation somehow? Disguise what you say. Decorate it with Sequency trimmings.

So that hell accept it."

"You can't disguise black as white."

She did not ask if he could bypass Sabul or go over

his head- Nobody on Anarres was supposed to be over anybody's head. There were no bypasses. If you could not work in solidarity with your syndics, you worked alone.

"What if ..." She stopped. She got up and put her boots by the heater to dry. She took off her coat, hung it up, and put a heavy hand-loomed shawl over her shoulders.

She sat down on the bed platform, grunting a little as she lowered herself the last few inches. She looked up at Shevek, who sat in profile between her and the windows.

"What if you offered to let him sign as co-author? Like the first paper you wrote.'*

"Sabul won't put his name to 'superstitious-religious speculations.*"

"Are you sure? Are you sure that isn't Just what he wants? He knows what this is, what you've done. You've always said he's shrewd. He knows it'll put him and the whole Sequency school in the recycle bin. But if he could share with you, share the credit? All he is, is ego. If he could say that it was his book . .. "

Shevek said bitterly, "I'd as soon share you with him as that book."

"Don't look at it that way, Shev. Ifs the book that's important—the ideas. Listen. We want to keep this child to be bom with us as a baby, we want to love it. But if for some reason it would die if we kept it, it could only live in a nursery, if we never could set eyes on it or know its name—if we had that choice, which would we choose? To keep the stillborn? Or to give life?"

"I don't know," he said. He put his head in his hands, rubbing his forehead painfully. "Yes, of course. Yes. But this—But I—"

"Brother, dear heart," Takver said. She clenched her hands together on her lap, but she did not reach out to him. "It doesn't matter what name is on the book. People will know. The truth is the book."

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"I am that book,** he said. Then he shut his eyes, and sat motionless. Takver went to him then, timidly, touching him as gently as if she touched a wound.

Early in the year 164 the first, incomplete, drastica*r edited version of the Principles of Simultaneity was printed in Abbenay, with Sabul and Shevek as joint authors. PDC was printing only essential records and directives, but Sabul had influence at the Press and in the Information division of PDC, and had persuaded them of the propaganda value of the book abroad. Urras, he said, was rejoicing over the drought and possible famine on Anarres;

the last shipment of loti journals was full of gloating prophecies of the imminent collapse of the Odonian economy. What better denial, said Sabul, than the publication of a major work of pure thought, "a monument of science," he said in his revised critique, "soaring above material adversity to prove the unquenchable vitality of the Odonian Society and its triumph over archist propertarian-ism in every area of human thought."

So the work was printed; and fifteen of the three hundred copies went aboard the loti freighter Mindful.

Shevek never opened a copy of the printed book. In the export packet, however, he put a copy of the original, complete manuscript, handwritten. A note on the cover asked that it be given to Dr. Atro of the College of the Noble Science of leu Eun University, with the compliments. of the author. It was certain that Sabul, who gave final approval to the packet, would notice the addition. Whether he took the manuscript out or left it in, Shevefc did not know. He might confiscate it out of spite; he might let it go, knowing that his emasculated abridgment would not have the desired effect on Urrasti physicists. He said nothing about the manuscript to Shevek. Shevek did not ask about it.

Shevek said very little to anyone, (hat spring. He took on a volunteer posting, construction work on a new water-recycling plant in South Abbenay, and was away at that work or teaching most of the day. He returned to his studies in subatomics, often spending evenings at the Institute's accelerator or the laboratories with the particle specialists. With Takver and their friends he was quiet, sober, gentle, and cold.

Takver got very big in the beUy and walked like a

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person carrying a large, heavy basket of laundry. She stayed at work at the fish labs till she had found and trained an adequate replacement for herself, then sha came home and began labor, more than a decad past her time. Shevek arrived home in midaftemoon. "You might go fetch the midwife," Takver said. 'Tell her the contractions are four or five minutes apart, but they're not speeding up much, so don't hurry very much."

He hurried, and when the midwife was out, he gave way to panic. Both the midwife and the block medic were out, and neither had left a note on the door saying where they could be found, as they usually did Shevek's heart began pounding in his chest, and he saw things suddenly with a dreadful clarity. He saw that this absence of help was an evil omen. He had withdrawn from Takver since the winter, since the decision about the book. She had been increasingly quiet, passive, patient. He understood that passivity now: it was a preparation for her deaths It was she who had withdrawn from him, and he had not tried to follow her. He had looked only at his own bitterness of heart, and never at her fear, or courage. He had let her alone because he wanted to be let alone, and so she had gone on, gone far, too far, would go on alone, forever.

He ran to the block clinic, arriving so out of breath and unsteady on his legs that they thought he was having a: heart attack. He explained. They sent a message off to another midwife and told him to go home, the partner would be wanting company. He went home, and at every stride the panic in him grew, the terror, the certainty of loss.

But once there he could not kneel by Takver and asfc her forgiveness, as he wanted desperately to do. Takver had no time for emotional scenes; she was busy. She had cleared the bed platform except for a clean sheet, and she was at work bearing a child. She did not howl or" scream, as she was not in pain, but when each contraction! came she managed it by muscle and breath control, and then let out a great fwuff of breath, like one who makes a terrific effort to lift a heavy weight. Shevek had never" seen any work that so used all the strength of the body.

He could not look on such work without trying to help in it. He could serve as handhold and brace when she needed leverage. They found this arrangement very quickly

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by trial and error, and kept to it after the midwife had come in. Takver gave birth afoot, squatting, her faco against Shevek's thigh, her hands gripping his braced arms. "There you are," the midwife said quietly under ttfc hard, engine-like pounding of Takver's breathing, and she took the slimy but recognizably human creature that had appeared. A gush of blood followed, and an amorphous;

mass of something not human, not alive. The terror he had forgotten came back into Shevek redoubled. It was death he saw. Takver had let go his arms and was huddled down quite limp at his feet He bent over her, stiff with horror and grief.

"That's it," said the midwife, "help her move aside so I can clean this up."

"I want to wash," Takver said feebly.

"Here, help her wash up. Those are sterile cloths—' there."

"Waw, waw, waw," said another voice.

The room seemed to be full of people.

"Now then," the midwife said. "Here, get that baby

back with her, at the breast, to help shut off the bloodflpw.

I want to get this placenta to the freezer in the clinic.

Ill be ten minutes."

"Where is—Where is the—"

"In the crib!" said the midwife, leaving. Shevek located the very small bed, which had been standing ready in the corner for four decads, and the infant in it. Somehow in this extreme rush of events the midwife had found time to clean the infant and even put a gown on it, so that it was not so fishlike and slippery as when he had seen it first. The afternoon had got dark, with the same peculiar rapidity and lack of time lapse. The lamp was on. Shevek picked up the baby to take it to Takver. Its face was incredibly small, with large, fragile-looking, closed eyelids. *'Give it here," Takver was saying. "Oh, do hurry up, please give it to me."

He brought it across the room and very cautiously lowered it onto Takver's stomach. "Ah!" she said softly, a call of pure triumph.

"What is it?" she asked after a while, sleepily.

Shevek was sitting beside her on the edge of the bed platform. He carefully investigated, somewhat taken aback

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by the length of gown as contrasted with the extreme shortness of limb. "Girl."

The midwife came back, went around putting things to rights. "You did a first-rate job," she remarked, to both of them. They assented mildly. "Ill look in in the rooming," she said leaving. The baby and Takver were already asleep. Shevek put his head down near Takver's. He was accustomed to the pleasant musky smell of her skin. This had changed; it had become a perfume, heavy and faint, heavy with sleep. Very gently he put one arm over her as she lay on her side with the baby against her breast In the room heavy with life he slept.

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.

This was fully in accord with Odonian social theory. The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo's thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.

Many people felt that this idea of fidelity was misapplied to sexual life. Odo's femininity swayed her, they said, towards a refusal of real sexual freedom; here, if nowhere else, Odo did not write for men. As many women as men made this criticism, so it would appear that it was not masculinity that Odo failed to understand, but a whole type of section of humanity, people to whom experiment is the soul of sexual pleasure.

Though she may not have understood them, and probably considered them propertarian aberrations from the

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norm—the human species being, if not a pair-bonding species, yet a time-binding one—still she provided better for the promiscuous than for those who tried long-term partnership. No law, no limit, no penalty, no punishment* no disapproval applied to any sexual practice of any kind, except the rape of a child or woman, for which the rapist's neighbors were likely to provide summary revenge if he did not get promptly into the gentler hands of a therapy center. But molestation was extremely rare in a society where complete fulfillment was the norm from puberty on, and the only social limit imposed on sexual activity was the mild one of pressure in favor of privacy, a kind of modesty imposed by the communality of life.

On the other hand, those who undertook to form and keep a partnership, whether homosexual or heterosexual, met with problems unknown to those content with sex wherever they found it They must face not only jealousy and possessiveness and the other diseases of passion for which monogamous union provides such a fine medium of growth, but also the external pressures of social organization. A couple that undertook partnership did so knowing that they might be separated at any time by the exigencies of labor distribution.

Divlab, the administration of the division of labor, tried to keep couples together, and to reunite them as soon as possible on request; but it could not always be done, especially in urgent levies, nor did anyone expect Divlab to remake whole lists and reprogram computers trying to do it. To survive, to make a go of life, an Anarresti knew he had to be ready to go where he was needed and do the work that needed doing. He grew up knowing labor distribution as a major factor of life, an immediate, permanent social necessity; whereas conjugality was a personal matter, a choice that could be made only within the larger choice.

But when a direction is chosen freely and followed whole-heartedly, it may seem that all things further the going. So the possibility and actuality of separation often served to strengthen the loyalty of partners. To maintain genuine spontaneous fidelity in a society that had no legal or moral sanctions against infidelity, and to maintain it during voluntarily accepted separations that could come at any time and might last years, was something of a chal-

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lenge. But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.

In the year 164 many people who had never sought it

got a taste of that kind of freedom, and liked it, liked the

sense of test and danger. The drought that began in the

summer of 163 met no relief in winter. By the summer

of 164 there was hardship, and the threat of disaster if the

drought went on.

Rationing was strict; labor drafts were imperative. The struggle to grow enough food and to get the food distributed became convulsive, desperate. Yet people were not desperate at alL Odo wrote: "A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for Joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."

There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a readiness to drop all care as soon as what could be done had been done. The old tag of "solidarity" had come alive again. There is exhilaration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, than all that tries the bond.

Early in the summer PDC put up posters suggesting that people shorten their working day by an hour or so, since the protein issue at commons was now insufficient for full normal expense of energy. The exuberant activity of the city streets had already been slowing down. People off work early loitered in the squares, played bowls in the dry parks, sat in workshop doorways and struck up conversation with passersby. The population of the city was visibly thinned, as several thousands had volunteered or been posted to emergency farm work. But mutual trust allayed depression or anxiety. "Well see each other through," they said, serenely. And great impulses of vitality ran just under the surface. When the wells in the northern suburbs failed, temporary mains from other districts were laid by volunteers working in their free time, skilled

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and unskilled, adults and adolescents, and the job was done in thirty hours.

Late in summer Shevek was posted to an emergency farm draft to Red Springs community in Southrising. Ofc the promise of some rain that had fallen in the equatoriaT storm season, they were trying to get a crop of grain holum planted and reaped before the drought returned.

He had been expecting an emergency posting, since his construction Job was finished and he had listed himself as available in the general labor pooL All summer he had done nothing but teach his courses, read, go out on whatever volunteer calls came up in their block and in the city, and come home to Takver and the baby. Takver had gone back to her laboratory, mornings only, after five decads.

As a nursing mother she was entitled to both protein and

carbohydrate supplements at meals, and she always

availed herself of both; their friends could not share extra

food with her any more, there was no extra food. She

was thin but flourishing, and the baby was small but solid.

Shevek got a great deal of pleasure from the baby.

Having sole charge of her in the mornings (they left her in

the nursery only while be taught or did volunteer work). he felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood. An alert, responsive baby, she gave Shevek the perfect audience for his suppressed verbal fantasies, what Takver called his crazy streak. He would sit the baby on his knees and address wild cosmological lectures to her, explaining how time was actually space turned inside out, the chronon being thus the everted viscera of the quantum, and distance one of the accidental properties of light. He gave extravagant and ever-changing nicknames to the baby, and recited ridiculous mnemonics at her: Time is a manacle. Time is tyrannical, Supermechanical, Superorganical—TOPI—and at the pop, the baby arose a short distance into the air, squeaking and waving her fat fists. Both received great satisfaction from these exercises. When he received his posting it was a wrench. He had hoped for something close to Abbenay, not clear around in Southrising. But along with the unpleasant necessity of leaving Takver and the baby for sixty days came the steady assurance of coming back to them. So long as be had that, he had no complaints.

The night before he left, Bedap came and ate at tho

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Institute refectory with them, and they came back together to the room. They sat talking in the hot night, the lamp unlit, the windows open. Bedap, who ate at a small commons where special arrangements were not a burden for the cooks to handle, had saved up his special-beverages ration for a decad and taken it all in the form of a liter bottle of fruit juice. He produced it with pride: a going-away party. They doled it around and savored it luxuriously, curling their tongues. "Do you remember," Takver said, "all the food, the night before you left Northsetting? I ate nine of those fried cakes."

"You wore your hair cut short then," Shevek said, startled by the recollection, which he had never before paired up to Takver. "That was you, wasn't it?"

"Who did you think it was?"

"By damn, what a kid you were theni"

'*So were you, it's ten years now. I cut my hair so Fd look different and interesting. A lot of good it did!" She laughed her loud, cheerful laugh, quickly strangling it so as not to wake the baby, asleep in her crib behind the screen. Nothing, however, woke the baby once she had got to deep. "I used to want so badly to be different. I wonder why?**

'There's a point, around age twenty," Bedap said, 'Svhen you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities."

"Or at least accept them with resignation," said Shevek.

"Shev is on a resignation binge," Takver said. "It's old age coming on. It must be terrible to be thirty."

"Don't worry, you won't be resigned at ninety," Bedap said, patting her back. "Are you even resigned to your child's name yet?"

The five- and six-letter names issued by the central registry computer, being unique to each living individual, took the place of the numbers which a computer-using society must otherwise attach to its members. An Anarresti needed no identification but his name. The name* therefore, was felt to be an important part of the self. though one no more chose it than one's nose or height.

Takver disliked the name the baby had got. Sadik. "It

still sounds like a mouthful of gravel," she said, "it doesn't

fit her"

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**I like it," Shevek said. **t sounds like a taB, slender girl with long black hair."

"But it is a short, fat girl with invisible hair," Bedap observed. •

"Give her time, brother! Listen. Fm going to make a speech."

"Speechi Speech!"

"Shh—"

'•Why shh? That baby would sleep through a cataclysm."

"Be quiet. I feel emotional." Shevek raised his cup of fruit juice. "I want to say—What I want to say is this.

I'm glad Sadik was bom now. In a hard year, in a hard time, when we need our brotherhood. I'm glad she was born now, and here. I'm glad she's one of us, an Odonian, our daughter and our sister. Fm glad she's sister to Bedap. That she's sister to Sabul, even to Sabul! I drink to this hope: that as long as she lives, Sadik will love her sisters:

and brothers as well, as joyfully, as I do now tonight. And that the rain will falL ... "

PDC, the principal users of radio, telephone, and mails, coordinated the means of long-distance communication, just as they did the means of long-distance travel and shipping. There being no ''business" on Anarres, in the sense of promoting, advertising, investing, speculating, and so forth, the mail consisted mostly of correspondence among industrial and professional syndicates, their directives and newsletters plus those of the PDC, and a small volume of personal letters. Living in a society where anyone could move whenever and wherever he wanted, an Anarresti tended to look for his friends where he was, not where he had been. Telephones were seldom used within a community; communities weren't all that big. Even Abbenay kept up the close regional pattern in its "blocks,'* the semiautonomous neighborhoods in which you could get to anyone or anything you needed, on foot. Telephone calls thus were mostly long-distance, and were handled by the PDC: personal calls had to be arranged beforehand

by mail, or were not conversations but simply messages left at the PDC center. Letters went unsealed, not by law, of course, but by convention. Personal communication at long distance is costly in materials and labor, and since the private and the public economy was the same, there was

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considerable feeling against unnecessary writing or calling. It was a trivial habit; it smacked of privatism, of egoizing. This was probably why the letters went unsealed: you had no right to ask people to carry a message that they couldnt read. A letter went on a PDC mail dirigible if you were lucky, and on a produce train if you weren't. Eventually it got to the mail depot in the town addressed, and there it lay, there being no postmen, until somebody told the addressee that he had a letter and he came to get it

The individual, however, decided what was and what was not necessary. Shevek and Takver wrote each other regularly, about once a decad. He wrote;

The trip was not bad, three days, a passenger track truck clear through. This is a big levy—three thousand people, they say. The effects of the drought are muck worse here. Not the shortages. The food in commons is the same ration as in Abbenay, only here you get boiled gara-greens at both meals every day because they have a local surplus. We too begin to feel we have had a surplus. But it is the climate here that makes misery. This is the Dust. The air is dry and the wind always blowing. There are brief rains, but within an hour after rain the ground loosens and the dusts begins to rise. It has rained less than half the annual average this season here.

Everyone on the Project gets cracked lips, nosebleed, eye irritations, and coughs. Among the people who live in Red Springs there is a lot of the dust cough. Babies have a specially hard time, you see many with skin and eyes inflamed. I wonder if I would have noticed that half a year ago. One becomes keener with parenthood. The work is just work and everyone is comradely, but the dry wind wears.

Last night I thought of the Ne Theras and in the night the sound of the wind was like the sound of the stream. I will not regret this separation. It has allowed me to see that I had begun to give less, as if 1 possessed you and you me and there was nothing more to be done. The real fact has nothing to do with ownership. What we do is assert the wholeness of Time. Tell me what Sadik does. I am teaching a class on the free days to some people who asked

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for it, one giri is & natural mathematician whom I shall recommend to the Institute. Your brother,,

Takver wrote to him: *

I am worried by a rather queer thing. The lectures for 3d Quarter were posted three days ago and I went to find out what schedule you would have at the

Inst. but no class or room was listed for you. I thought they had left you off by mistake so went to the Members Synd. and they said yes they wanted you to give the Geom. class. So I went to the Inst Coord. office that old woman with the nose and she knew nothing, no no I don*t know anything, go to Central Postingi That is nonsense I said and went to Sabul. But he was not in the Phys. offices and I have not seen him yet though I have been back twice.

With Sadik who wears a wonderful white hat Terrus knitted her out of unraveled yam and looks tremendously fetching. I refuse to go hunt out Sabul in the room or worm-tunnel or wherever he lives.

Maybe he is off doing volunteer work ha! ha! Perhapsl you should telephone the Institute and find out what sort of mistake they have made? In fact I did go down and check at Divlab Central Posting but there wasn't any new listing for you. People there were all right but that old woman with the nose is inefficient and not helpful, and nobody takes an interest. Bedap is right we have let bureaucracy creep up on us.

Please come back (with mathematical genius girl if necessary), separation is educational all right but your presence is the education I want I am getting a half liter fruit Juice plus calcium allotment a day because my milk was running short and S. yelled a lot Good old doctors!! All. always, T.

Shevek never got this letter. He had left Southrising before it got to the mail depot in Red Springs.

It was about twenty-five hundred miles from Red Springs to Abbenay. An individual on the move would have simply hitchhiked, all transport vehicles being available as pasSenger vehicles for as many people as they would hold;

but since four hundred and fifty people were being re-

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distributed to their regular postings in Northwest, a train was provided for them. It was made up of passenger cars, or at least of cars being used at the moment for passengers. The least popular was the boxcar that had recently carried a shipment of smoked fish.

After a year of the drought the normal transport Unes were insufficient, despite the fierce efforts of the transport workers to meet demands. They were the largest federative in the Odonian sodety: self-organized, of course, in regional syndicates coordinated by representatives who met and worked with the local and central PDC. The network maintained by the transport federative was effective in normal times and in limited emergencies; it was flexible, adaptable to circumstance, and the Syndics of Transport had great team and professional pride. They called their engines and dirigibles names like Indomitable, Endurance, Eat-the-Wind: they had mottoes—We Always Get There—Nothing Is Too Much!—But now, when whole regions of the planet were threatened with immediate famine if food was not brought in from other regions, and when large emergency drafts of workers must be

shifted, the demands laid on transport were too much.

There were not enough vehicles; there were not enough people to run them. Everything the federative had on wings or wheels was pressed into service, and apprentices, retired workers, volunteers, and emergency draftees were helping man the trucks, the trains, the ships, the ports, the yards.

The train Shevek was on went along in short rushes and long waits, since all provision trains took precedence over it Then it stopped altogether for twenty hours. An overworked or underschooled dispatcher had made an error, and there had been a wreck up the line.

The little town where the train stopped had no extra food in its commons or warehouses. It was not a farm community, but a mill town, manufacturing concrete and foamstone, built on the fortunate congruence of lime deposits and a navigable river. There were truck gardens, but it was a town dependent upon transport for food. If the four hundred and fifty people on the train ate, the one hundred and sixty local people would not. Ideally, they would all share, all half-eat or half-starve together. If there had been fifty, or even a hundred, people on the

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train, the community probably wouOTiave spared them at least a baking of bread. But four hundred and fifty?

If they gave that many anything, they would be wiped out for days. And would the next provisions train come, after those days? And how much grain would be on it? They gave nothing.

The travelers, having had nothing in the way of breakfast that day, thus fasted for sixty hours. They did not get a meal until the line had been cleared and their train had run on a hundred and fifty miles to a station with a refectory stocked for passengers.

It was Shevek's first experience of hunger. He had fasted sometimes when he was working because he did not want to be bothered with eating, but two full meals a day had always been available: constant as sunrise and sunset. He had never even thought what it might be like to have to go without them. Nobody in his society, nobody in the world, had to go without them.

While he got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.

The passengers' resentment of the townsfolk got bitter, but it was less ominous than the behavior of the townsfolk —the way they hid behind "their" walls with "their" property, and ignored the train, never looked at it. Shevek

was not the only gloomy passenger; a long conversation meandered up and down beside the stopped cars, people dropping in and out of it, arguing and agreeing, all on the same general theme that his thoughts followed. A raid on the truck gardens was seriously proposed, and bitterly debated, and might have been carried out, if the train had not hooted at last for departure.

But when at last it crawled into the station down the line, and they got a meal—a half loaf of holum bread and a bowl of soup—their gloom gave place to elation. By the time you got to the bottom of the bowl you noticed that

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the soup was pretty thin, but the first taste of it, the first taste had been wonderful, worth fasting for. They all agreed on that. They got back into the train laughing and joking together. They had seen each other through.

A truck-train convoy picked up the Abbenay passengers at Equator Hill and brought them the last five hundred miles. They came into the city late on a windy night of early autumn. It was getting on for midnight; the streets were empty. Wind flowed through them like a turbulent dry river. Over dim street lamps the stars flared with a bright shaken light. The dry storm of autumn and passion carried Shevek through the streets, half running, three miles to the northern quarter, alone in the dark city.

He took the three steps of the porchway in one, ran down the hall, came to the door, opened it. The room was dark.

Stars bumed in the dark windows. "Takveri" he said, and heard the silence. Before he turned on the lamp, there in the dark, in the silence, all at once, he learned what separation was.

Nothing was gone. There was nothing to be gone. Only Sadik and Takver were gone. The Occupations of Uninhabited Space turned softly, gleaming a little, in the draft from the open door.

There was a letter on the table. Two letters. One from Takver. It was brief; she had received an emergency posting to the Comestible Algae Experimental Development Laboratories in Northeast, for an indeterminate period. She wrote:

I could not in conscience refuse now. I went and talked to them at Divlab and also read their project sent in to Ecology at PDC, and it is true they need me because I have worked exactly on this algae-cuiate-shrimp-kukuri cycle. I requested at Divlab that you be posted to Rolny but of course they won't act on that until you also request it, and if this is not possible because of work at the Inst. then you won't.

After all if it goes on too long I will tell them get another geneticist, and come back! Sadik is very well and can say yite for light. It will not be very long. All, for life, your sister, Takver. Oh please come if you can.

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The other note was scribbled on a tiny bit of paper:

"Shevek: Physics off. on yr return. Sabul."

Shevek roamed around the room. The storm, the impetus that had hurled him through the streets, was still in him. It had come up against the wall. He could go no further, yet he must move. He looked in the closet. Nothing was in it but his winter coat and a shirt which Takver. who liked fine handwork, had embroidered for him; her few clothes were gone. The screen was folded back, showing the empty crib. The sleeping platform was not made up, but the orange blanket covered the rolled-up bedding neatly. Shevek came up against the table again, read Takver's letter again. His eyes filled with tears of anger. A rage of disappointment shook him, a wrath, a foreboding.

No one was to blame. That was the worst of it, Takver was needed, needed to work against hunger—hers, his,

Sadik's hunger. Society was not against them- It was for them; with them; it was them.

But he had given up his book, and his love, and his child. How much can a man be asked to give up?

"Hell!" he said aloud. Pravic was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. "Oh, hell'" he repeated. He crumpled up Sabul's grubby little note vindictively, and then brought his handa down clenched against the edge of the table, twice, three times, in his passion seeking pain. But there was nothing. There was nothing to be done and nowhere to be gone. He was left at last with the bedding to unroll, with lying down alone and getting to sleep, with evil dreams and without comfort.

First thing in the morning, Bunub knocked. He met her at the door and did not stand aside to het her in. She was their neighbor down the hall, a woman of fifty, a machinist in the Air Vehicle Engine factory. Takver had always been entertained by her, but she infuriated Shevek.

For one thing, she wanted their room. She had claimed it when it first came vacant, she said, but the enmity of the block housing registrar bad prevented her getting it Her room did not have the comer window, the object of her undying envy. It was a double, though, and she lived alone in it, which, given the housing shortage, was egoistic of her; but Shevek would never have wasted time on disapproving her if she had not forced him by making

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excuses. She explained, explained. She had a partner, a lifelong partner, "just like you two," simper. Only where was the partner? Somehow he was always spoken of in the past tense. Meanwhile the double room was pretty well justified by the succession of men that passed through Bunub's door, a different man every night, as if Bunub were a roaring girl of seventeen. Takver observed the procession with admiration. Bunub came and told her all about the men, and complained, complained. Her not having the comer room was only one among unnumbered grievances. She had a mind both insidious and invidious,

which could find the bad in anything and take it straight to her bosom. The factory where she worked was a poisonous mass of incompetence, favoritism, and sabotage. Meetings of her syndicate were bedlams of unrighteous innuendo all directed at her. The entire social organism was dedicated to the persecution of Bunub. All this made Takver laugh, sometimes wildly, right in Bunub's face.

"Oh, Bunub, you are so funny!" she would gasp and the woman, with greying hair and a thin mouth and downcast eyes, would smile thinly, not offended, not at all, and continue her monstrous recitations. Shevek knew that Takver was right to laugh at her, but he could not do it.

"It's terrible." she said, slithering in past him and going straight to the table to read Takver's letter. She picked it up; Shevek plucked it out of her hand with a calm rapidity she had not prepared for. "Perfectly terrible. Not even a decad's notice. Just, 'Come here! Right now!'

And they say we're free people, we're supposed to be free people. What a joke! Breaking up a happy partnership that way. That's why they did it, you know. They're against partnerships, you can see it all the time, they intentionally post partners apart. That's what happened with me and Labeks, exactly the same thing. Well never get back together. Not with the whole of Divlab lined up against us. There's the little empty crib. Poor little thing! She never ceased crying these four decads, day and night. Kept me awake for hours. It's the shortages, of course; Takver just didn't have enough milk. And then to send a nursing mother off to a posting hundreds of miles away like that, imagine! I don't suppose you'll be able to join her there, where is it they sent her to?"

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"Northeast I want to get over to breakfast, Bunub.

Tm hungry." „

"Isn't it typical how they did it while you were away.

"Did what while I was away?"

"Sent her away—broke up the partnership." She was reading Sabul's note, which she had uncrumpled with care. *They know when to move inl I suppose you'll be leaving this room now, wont you? They wont let you keep a double. Takver talked about coming back soon, but I could see she was just trying to keep her spirits up. Freedom, we're supposed to be free, big Jokel Pushed around from here to there—"

"Oh, by damn, Bunub, if Takver hadn't wanted the posting she'd have refused it. You know we're facing a famine."

''Well. I wondered if she hadnt been looking for a move.

It often happens after a baby comes- I thought long ago you should have given that baby to a nursery. The amount it cried. Children come between partners. Tie them down.

It's only natural, as you say, that she should have been looking for a change, and jumped at it when she got it"

"I did not say that I'm going to breakfast." He strode out, quivering at five or six sensitive spots which Bunub had accurately wounded. The horror of the woman was that she voiced all his own most despicable fears. She now stayed behind in the room, probably to plan her move into it.

He had overslept and got to commons just before they closed the doors. Ravenous still from the journey, he took a double helping of both porridge and bread. The boy behind the serving tables looked at him frowning. These days nobody took double helpings. Shevek stared frowning back and said nothing. He had gone eighty-odd hours now on two bowls of soup and one kilo of bread, and he had a right to make up for what he had missed, but he was damned if he would explain. Existence is its own Justification, need is right He was an Odoniaa, he left guilt to profiteers.

He sat down by himself, but Desar joined him immediately, smiling, staring at or beside him with disconcerting wall eyes. "Been gone while," Desar said.

"Farm draft. Six decads. How have things been here?*'

"Lean."

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"They'll get leaner.'* Shevek said, but without real conviction, for he was eating, and the porridge tasted exceedingly good. Frustration, anxiety, famine! said his forebrain, seat of intellect; but his hindbrain, squatting in unrepentant savagery back in the deep skull's darkness, said Food now! Food now! Good, good!

"Seen Sabul?"

"No. I got in late last night." He glanced up at Desar and said with attempted indifference, 'Takver got a famine posting; she had to leave four days ago."

Desar nodded with genuine indifference. "Heard that.

You hear about Institute reorganizing?"

"No. What's up?"

The mathematician spread out his long, slender hands on me table and looked down at them. He was always tongue-tied and telegraphic; in fact, he stammered; but whether it was a verbal or a moral stammer Shevek had never decided. As he had always liked Desar without knowing why, so there were moments when he disliked Desar intensely, again without knowing why. This was one of the moments. There was a slyness in the expression of Desar's mouth, his downcast eyes, like Bunub's downcast eyes.

"Shakedown. Cutting back to functional staff. Shipeg's out." Shipeg was a notoriously stupid mathematician who had always managed, by assiduous flattery of students, to get himself one student-requisitioned course each term.

"Sent him off. Some regional institute."

"He'd do less harm hoeing ground-holum," Shevek said.

Now that he was fed, it appeared to him that the drought might after all be of service to the social organism. The priorities were becoming clear again. Weaknesses, soft spots, sick spots would be scoured out, sluggish organs restored to full function, the fat would be trimmed off the body politic.

"Put in word for you. Institute meeting," Desar said, looking up but not meeting, because he could not meet, Shevek's eyes. As he spoke, though Shevek did not yet understand what he meant, he knew that Desar was lying.

He knew it positively. Desar had not put in a word for him, but a word against him.

The reason for his moments of detesting Desar was

clear to him now: a recognition, heretofore unadmitted, of

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the element of pure malice in Desar*s personality. That Desar also loved him and was trying to gain power over him was equally clear, and, to Shevek, equally detestable. The devious ways of posseasivenesa, the labyrinths of love/hate, were meaningless to him. Arrogant, intolerant, he walked right through their walls. He did not speak again to the mathematician, but finished his breakfast and went off across the quadrangle, through the bright morning of early autumn, to the physics office.

He went to the back room which everybody called "Sabul's office," the room where they had first met, where Sabul had given him the grammar and dictionary of lotic. Sabul looked up warily across the desk, looked down again, busy with papers, the hardworking, abstracted scientist;

then allowed awareness of Shevek's presence to seep into his overloaded brain; then became, for him, effusive. He looked thin and aged, and when he got up he stooped more than he had used to do, a placating kind of stoop.

"Bad times," he said. "Eh? Bad timest"

'They'll get worse," Shevek said lightly. "How's everything here?"

"Bad, bad." Sabul shook his grizzled head. "This is a bad time for pure science, for the intellectual."

"Is there ever a good one?"

Sabul produced an unnatural chuckle.

"Did anything come in for us on the summer shipments from Urras?" Shevek inquired, clearing off sitting room on the bench. He sat down and crossed his legs. His light skin had tanned and the fine down that covered his face had bleached to silver while he worked in the fields in South-rising. He looked spare, and sound, and young, compared to Sabul. Both men were aware of the contrast

"Nothing of interest." "No reviews of the Principles?"

"No." SabuTs tone was surly, more like himself.

"No letters?"

'•No."

"That's odd."

"What's odd about it? What did you expect, a lectureship at leu Eun University? The Seo Oen Prize?"

"I expected reviews and replies. There's been time." He said this as Sabul said, "Hardly been time for reviews yet"

There was a pause.

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"You'll have to realize, Shevek, that a mere conviction of rightness isn't self-justifying. You worked hard on the book, I know. I worked hard editing if too, trying to make clear that it wasn't just an irresponsible attack on Sequency theory, but had positive aspects- But if other physicists don't see value in your work, then you've got to begin looking at the values you hold and seeing where the discrepancy lies. If it means nothing to other people, what's the good of it? What's its function?"

"I'm a physicist, not a functions analyst," Shevek said amiably.

"Every Odonian has to be a functions analyst You're thirty, aren't you? By that age a man should know not only his cellular function but his organic function—what his optimum role in the social organism is. You havent had to think about that, perhaps, as much as most people-"

"No. Since I was ten or twelve Fve known what kind of work I had to do."

"What a boy thinks he likes to do isnt always what his society needs from him."

"I'm thirty, as you say. Rather an old boy.**

"You've reached that age in an unusually sheltered, protected environment First the Northsetting Regional Institute—"

"And a forest project, and farm projects, and practical trainingi and block committees, and volunteer work since the drought; the usual amount of necessary kleggich. I like doing it, in fact But I do physics too. What are you getting at?"

As Sabul did not answer but merely glared under his heavy, oily brows, Shevek added, "You might as well say it plainly, because you're not going to arrive at it by way of my social conscience."

"Do you consider the work you*ve done here functional?"

"Yes. The more that is organized, the more central the organism: centrality here implying the field of real function.' Tomar's Definitions. Since temporal physics attempts to organize everything comprehensible to the human mind, it is by definition a centrally functional activity."

"It doesn't get bread into people's mouths."

"I just spent six decads helping to do that. When I'm

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called again, HI go again. Meanwhile I stick by my trade.

If there's physics to be done, I claim the right to do it."

"What you have to face is the fact that at this point there is no physics to be done. Not the kind you do.

We've got to gear to practicality." Sabul shifted in his chair. He looked sullen and uneasy. "We've had to release five people for reposting. I'm sorry to say that you're one of them. There it is."

"Just where I thought it was,** Shevek said, though in fact he had not till that moment realized that Sabul was kicking him out of the Institute- As soon as he heard it, however, it seemed familiar news; and he would not give Sabul the satisfaction of seeing him shaken.

"What worked against you was a combination of things.

The abstruse, irrelevant nature of the research you've done these last several years. Plus a certain feeling, not necessarily Justified, but existing among many student and teaching members of the Institute, that both your teaching and your behavior reflect a certain disaffection, a degree of privatism, of nonaltruism. This was spoken of in meeting. I spoke for you, of course. But I'm only one syndic among many." /

"Since when was altruism an Odoman virtue?" Shevek said. "Well. never mind. I see what you mean." He stood up. He could not keep seated any longer, but otherwise had himself in control, and spoke perfectly naturally. "I take it you didst recommend me for a teaching post elsewhere.'*

"What would have been the use?" said Sabul, almost melodious in self-exculpation. "No one's taking on new teachers. Teachers and students are working side by side at famine-prevention jobs all over the planet. Of course, this crisis won't last. In a year or so we'll be looking back on it, proud of the sacrifices we made and the work we did, standing by each other, share and share alike. But right now ... "

Shevek stood erect, relaxed, gazing out the small, scratched window at the blank sky. There was a mighty desire in him to tell Sabul, finally, to go to hell. But it was a different and profounder impulse that found words.

"Actually," he said, "you're probably right." With that he nodded to Sabul and left.

He caught an omnibus downtown. He was still in a

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hurry, driven. He was following a pattern and wanted to come to the end of it, come to rest. He went to the Division of Labor Central Posting offices to request a posting to the community to which Takver had gone.

Divlab, with its computers and its huge task of coordination, occupied a whole square; its buildings were handsome, imposing by Anarresti standards, with fine, plain lines. Inside, Central Posting was high-ceilinged and barnlike, very full of people and activity, the walls covered with posting notices and directions as to which desk or department to go to for this business or that. As Shevek waited in one of the lines he- listened to the people in front of him, a boy of sixteen and a man in his sixties.

The boy was volunteering for a famine-prevention posting.

He was full of noble feelings, spflling over with brotherhood, adventurousness, hope. He was delighted to be going off on his own, leaving his childhood behind. He talked a great deal, like a child, in a voice not yet used to its deeper tones. Freedom, freedom! rang in his excited talk, in every word; and the old man's voice grumbled and rumbled through it, teasing but not threatening, mocking but not cautioning. Freedom, the ability to go somewhere and do something, freedom was what the old man praised and cherished in the young one, even while he mocked his self-importance. Shevek listened to them with pleasure. They broke the morning's series of grotesques.

As soon as Shevek explained where he wanted to go, the clerk got a worried look, and went off for an atlas, which she opened on the counter between them. "Now look," she said. She was an ugly little woman with buck teeth; her bands on the colored pages of the atlas were deft and soft. "That's Rolny, see, the peninsula sticking down into the North Temaenian. It's just a huge sandpit There's nothing on it at all but the marine laboratories away out there at the end, see? Then the coast's all swamp and salt marsh till you get clear round here to Harmony —a thousand kilometers. And west of it is the Coast Barrens. The nearest you could get to Rolny would be some town in the mountains. But they're not asking for emergency postings there; they're pretty self-sufficing. Of course, you could go there anyhow," she added in a slightly different tone.

"It's too far from Rolny," he said, looking at the map,

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noticing in the mountains of Northeast the little isolated town where Takver had grown up. Round Valley. "Don't they need a janitor at the marine lab? A statistician? Somebody to feed the fish?"

"I'll check."

The human/computer network of ffles in Divlab was set up with admirable efficiency. It did not take the clerk five minutes to get the desired information sorted out from the enormous, continual input and outgo of infor-

mation concerning every job being done, every position wanted, every workman needed, and the priorities of each in the general economy of the world-wide society.

"They just filled an emergency draft—that's the partner, isn't it? They got everybody they wanted, four technicians and an experienced seiner. Staff complete."

Shevek leaned his elbows on the counter and bowed his head, scratching it, a gesture of confusion and defeat masked by self-consciousness. "Well," he said, "I don't know what to do."

"Look, brother, how long is the partner's posting?" "Indefinite."

"But it's a famine-prevention job, isn't it? It's not going to go on like this forever. It can'tl It'll rain, this winter."

He looked up into his sister's earnest, sympathetic, harried face. He smiled a little, for he could not leave her effort to give hope without response.

"You'll get back together. Meanwhile—*'

"Yes. Meanwhile," he said.

She awaited his decision.

It was his to make; and the options were endless. He could stay in Abbenay and organize classes in physics if he could find volunteer students. He could go to Rolny Peninsula and live with Takver though without any place in the research station. He could live anywhere and do nothing but get up twice a day and go to the nearest commons to be fed. He could do what he pleased.

The identity of the words "work" and "play" in Pravic had, of course, a strong ethical significance. Odo had seen the danger of a rigid moralism arising from the use of the word "work" in her analogic system: the cells must work together, the optimum working of the organism, the work done by each element, and so forth. Cooperation and function, essential concepts of the Analogy, both im-

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plied work. The proof of an experiment, twenty test tubes in a laboratory or twenty million people on the Moon, is simply, does it work? Odo had seen the moral trap. "The saint is never busy," she had said, perhaps wistfully.

But the choices of the social being are never made alone.

"Well," Shevek said, "I Just came back from a famine-prevention posting. Anything else like that need doing?'*

The clerk gave him an elder-sisterly look, incredulous but forgiving. 'There's about seven hundred Urgent calls posted around the room," she said. "Which one would you like?"

"Any of them need math?"

'They're mostly farming and skilled labor. Do yon have any engineering training?"

"Not much."

"Well, there's work-coordinating. That certainly takes a head for figures. How about this one?"

"All right."

"That's down in Southwest, in the Dust, you know."

"I've been in the Dust before. Besides, as you say, someday it will rain. .. .*'

She nodded, smiling, and typed onto his Divlab record:

FROM Abbenay, NW Cent lust Sci, TO Elbow, SW. wk co, phosphate mill #1: EMERG PSTG: 5-1-3-165— indefinite.

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s

Chapter 9

Shevek was awakened by the bells in the chapel tower pealing the Prime Harmony for morning religious service.

Each note was like a blow on the back of his head. He was so sick and shaky he could not even sit up for a long time. He finally managed to shuffle into the bathroom and take a long cold bath, which relieved the headache; but his whole body continued to fed strange to him—to feel, somehow, vile. As he began to'-be able to think again, fragments and moments of the night/ before came into his' mind, vivid, senseless little scenes frdpa the party at Vea's. He tried not to think about them, *nd then could think of nothing else. Everything, everytliing became vile. He' sat down at his desk, and sat th^re staring, motionless, perfectly miserable, for half an hour.

He had been embarrassed often enough, and had felt himself a fool. As a young man he had suffered from tho sense that others thought him strange, unlike them; in later years he had felt, having deliberately invited, the anger and contempt of many of his fellows on Anarres. But he had never really accepted their Judgment. He had never been ashamed.

He did not know that this paralyzing humiliation was 8 chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache. Nor

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would the knowledge have made much difference to him.

Shame—the sense of vileness and of self-estrangement—^ was a revelation. He saw with a new clarity, a hideous clarity; and saw far past those incoherent memories of the

end of the evening at Vea's. It was not only poor Vea who had betrayed him. It was not only the alcohol that he had tried to vomit up; it was all the bread he had eaten on Urras.

He leaned his elbows on the desk and put his head in his hands, pressing in on the temples, the cramped position of pain; and he looked at his life in the light of shame.

On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the Bake of society.

Here on Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a selfindulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.

On his first night in this room be had asked them, challenging and curious, "What are you going to do with me?" He knew now what they had done with him.

Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him.

He had thought to bargain with them, a very naive anarchist's notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

He saw now—in detail, item by item from the begin-ning—that he had made a mistake in coming to Urras; his first big mistake, and one that was likely to last him the rest of his life. Once he had seen it, once he had rehearsed all the evidences of it that he had suppressed and denied for months—and it took him a long time, sitting there motionless at his desk—until he had arrived at the ludicrous and abominable last scene with Vea, and had lived through that again too, and felt his face go hot until his ears sang: then he was done with it. Even in this postalcoholic vale of tears, he felt no guilt. That was all done, now, and what must be thought about was, what must he do now? Having locked himself in jail, how might he act as a free man?

He would not do physics for the politicians. That was; clear, now.

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If he stopped working, would they let him go home?

At this, he drew a long breath and raised his head, looking with unseeing eyes at the sunlit green landscape out the window. It was the first dme he had let himself think of going home as a genuine possibility. The thought threatened to break down the gates and flood him with urgent yearning. To speak Pravic, to speak to friends, to see Takver, Pilun, Sadik, to touch the dust of Anarres....

They would not let him go. He had not paid his way.

Nor could he let himself go: give up and run.

As he sat at the desk in the bright morning sunlight he

brought his hands down against the edge of the desk deliberately and sharply, twice, three times; his face was calm and appeared thoughtful,

"Where do I go?" he said aloud.

A knock on the door. Efor came in with a breakfast tray and the morning papers. "Come in at six usual but catching up your sleep," he observed, setting out the tray with admirable deftness.

"I got drunk last night," Shevek said.

"Beautiful while it lasts." said Efor. "That be all/sir?

Very well," and he exited with the same deftness, bowing on the way to Pae, who entered as he left.

"Didn't mean to barge in on your breakfast! On my way back from chapel, just thought I'd look in."

"Sit down. Have some chocolate." Shevek was unable to eat unless Pae made some pretense at least of eating with him. Pae took a honey roll and crumbled it about on a plate. Shevek still felt rather shaky but very hungry now, and attacked his breakfast with energy. Pae seemed to find it harder than usual to start conversation.

"You're still getting this trash?" he asked at last in an amused tone, touching the folded newspapers Efor had set on the table.

"Efor brings them."

"Does he?"

"I asked him to," Shevek said, glancing at Pae, a split-second reconnoitering glance. 'They broaden my comprehension of your country. I take an interest in your lower classes. Most Anarresti came from the lower classes."

"Yes, of course," the younger man said, looking respectful and nodding. He ate a small bite of honey roll. "I think I'd like a drop of that chocolate after all," he said, and

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rang the bell on the tray. Efor appeared at the door. "Another cup," Pae said without turning. "Well, sir, we'd looked forward to taking you about again, now the weather's turning fine, and showing you more of the country. Even a visit abroad, perhaps. But this damned war has put an end to all such plans, I'm afraid."

Shevek looked at the headline of the topmost paper:

10, THU CLASH NEAR BENBILI CAPITAL.

'There's later news than that on the telefax," Pae said. "We've liberated the capital. General Havevert will be reinstalled."

"Then the war is over?"

"Not while Thu still holds the two eastern provinces."

**I see. So your army and Thu*s army will fight in Benbili. But not here?"

**No. no. It would be utter folly for them to invade us, or us them. We've outgrown the kind of barbarism that used to bring war into the heart of the high civilizations! The balance of power is kept by this kind of police action. However, we are officially at war. So an the tiresome old restrictions will come into effect, I'm afraid."

"Restrictions?"

"Classification of research done in the College of Noble Science, for one thing. Nothing to it, really, just a government rubber stamp. And sometimes a delay getting a paper published, when the higher-ups think it must be ^dangerous because they dont understand it! ... And travel's a bit limited, especially for you and the other nonnationals here, I'm afraid. So long as the state of war lasts, you're not actually supposed to leave the campus,

I believe, without clearance from the Chancellor. But pay no attention to that. I can get you out of here whenever you like without going through all the rigmarole.**

"You hold the keys," Shevek said, with an ingenuous ismfle.

"Oh, Fm an absolute specialist in it. I love getting around rules and outwitting the authorities. Perhaps I'm a natural anarchist, eh? Where the devil is that old fool I sent for a cup?"

**He must go down to the kitchens to get one."

"Needn't take half the day about it. Well, I won't wait.

Don't want to take up what's left of your morning. By the way, did you see the latest Bulletin of the Space Research

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Foundation? They print Reumere's plans for the ansible."

"What is the ansible?"

"It's what he's calling an instantaneous communication device. He says if the temporalists—that's you, of course '—will just work out the time-inertia equations, the en-gineers—that's him—will be able to build the damned thing, test it, and thus incidentally prove the validity of the theory, within months or weeks."

"Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built before I have provided the cause.** He smiled again, rather less ingenuously- When Pae had shut the door behind himself, Shevek suddenly stood up. "You filthy profiteering liarl" he said in Pravic, white with rage, his hands clenched to keep them from picking something up and throwing it after Pae.

Efor came in carrying a cup and saucer on a tray. He stopped short, looking apprehensive.

"It's all right, Efor. He didn't—He didn't want the cup.

You can take it all now."

"Very good, sir." /

"Listen. I should like no visitors, for a while. Can you keep them out?"

"Easy sir. Anybody special?"

**Yes, him. Anybody. Say I am working."

**He'U be glad to hear that, sir," Efor said, his wrinkles melting with malice for an instant; then with respectful familiarity, "Nobody you don't want get past roe," and finally with formal propriety, "Thank you, sir, and good morning."

Food, and adrenalin, had dispelled Shevek'a paralysis.

He walked up and down the room, irritable and restless.

He wanted to act He had spent nearly a year now doing nothing, except being a fool. It was time he did something.

Well, what had he come here to do?

To do physics. To assert, by his talent, the rights of any citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained while working, and to share the product with all who wanted it The rights of an Odonian and of a human being.

His benevolent and protective hosts let him work, and maintained him while working, all right The problem came on the third limb. But he himself had not got

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there yet. He had not done his job. He couldn't share what he didn't have.

He went back to the desk, sat down, and took a couple of scraps of heavily scribbled paper out of the least accessible and least useful pocket of his tight-fitting, stylish trousers. He spread these scraps out with his fingers and looked at them. It occurred to him that he was getting to be like Sabul, writing very small, in abbreviations, on shreds of paper. He knew now why Sabul did it: he was possessive and secretive. A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urraa.

Again Shevek sat quite motionless, his head bowed, studying the two little bits of paper on which he had noted down certain essential points of the General Temporal Theory, so far as it went.

For the next three days he sat at the desk and looked at the two bits of paper.

At times he got up and walked around the room, or Wrote something down, or employed the desk computer, or asked Efor to bring him something to eat, or lay down and fell asleep. Then he went back to the desk and sat there.

On the evening of the third day he was sitting, for a

change, on the marble seat by the hearth. He had sat down there on the first night he entered this room, this gracious prison cell, and generally sat there when he had visitors.

He had no visitors at the moment, but he was thinking about Saio Pae.

Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted.

There was a trivial, abortive quality to his roind; it lacked depth, affect imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument Yet its potentiality had been real, and though deformed had not been lost. Pae was a very clever physicist. Or, more exactly, he was very clever about physics.

He had not done anything original, but his opportunism, his sense for where advantage lay, led him time after time to the most promising field. He had the flair for where to set to work, just as Shevek did, and Shevek respected it in him as in himself, for it is a sinpilariy important attribute in a scientist. It was Pae who had given Shevek the book translated from the Terran, the symposium on the theories of Relativity, the ideas of which had come to occupy his mind more and more of late. Was it possible that

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after an he had come to Urras simply to meet Saio Pae, his enemy? That he had come seeking him, knowing that he might receive from his enemy what he could not re^A ceive from his brothers and friends, what no Anarresti could give him: knowledge of the foreign, of the alien:

news....

He forgot Pae. He thought about the book. He could not state clearly to himself what, exactly, he had found so stimulating about it Most of the physics in it was, after all, outdated; the methods were cumbersome, and the alien attitude sometimes quite disagreeable. The Terrans had been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but the physical and should not be taken as implying the metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of course, was auperficially true; and yet he had used number, the bridge between the rational and the perceived, between psyche and matter, "Number the Indisputable," as the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality -

Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the Terran's thought Shevek caught this combination, was constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Haying explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of spacedme, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields, at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclusively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound:

at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept.

And his refusal had been equally correct—in the long run.

Only he had lacked the tools to prove it—the Saeba variables and the theories of infinite velocity and complex

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cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.

But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the un-provable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.

In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence—the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days. and indeed these last ten years—really matter?

He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear. The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Sae-ban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the meth-- od, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.

The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight There was no end, no end....

And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears,

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as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh

is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one's life has been fulfilled.

Yet he kept looking, and going farther, with that same childish joy, until all at once he could not go any farther;

he came back, and looking around through his tears saw that the room was dark and the high windows were full of stars.

The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.

After a while he got up shakily and lighted the lamp. He wandered around the room a little, touching things, the binding of a book, the shade of a lamp, glad to be back among these familiar objects, back in his own world—for at this instant the difference between this planet and that one, between Urras and.Anarres, was no more significant to him than the difference between two grains of sand on the shore of the sea. There were no more abysses, no more walls. There was no more exile. He had seen the foundations of the universe, and they were solid.

He went into the bedroom, walking slowly and a little unsteadily, and dropped onto the bed without undressing.

He lay there with his arms behind his head, occasionally foreseeing and planning one detail or another of the work that had to be done, absorbed in a solemn and delightful thankfulness, which merged gradually into serene reverie, and then into sleep.

He slept for ten hours. He woke up thinking of the equations that would express the concept of interval. He went to the desk and set to work on them. He had a class that afternoon, and met it; he took his dinner at the Senior Faculty commons and talked with his colleagues there about the weather, and the war, and whatever else they brought up. If they noticed any change in him he did not know it, for he was not really aware of them at all. He came back to his room and worked.

The Urrasti counted twenty hours in the day. For eight days he spent twelve to sixteen hours daily at his desk, or roaming about his room, his light eyes turned often to the windows, outside which shone the warm spring sunlight, or the stars and the tawny, waning Moon,

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Coming in with the breakfast tray, Efor found him lying half-dressed on the bed, his eyes shut, talking in a foreign language. He roused him. Shevek woke with a convulsive start, got up and staggered into the other room, to the desk, which was perfectly empty; he stared at the computer, which had been cleared, and then stood there like a man who has been hit on the head and does not know it yet. Efor succeeded in getting him to lie down again and said, "Fever there, sir. Call the doctor?"

"Not" "Sure, sir?"

"Nol Don't let anybody in here. Say I am ill, Efor."

"Then they'll fetch the doctor sure. Can say you're still working, sir. They like that"

"Lock the door when you go out," Shevek said. His nontransparent body had let him down; he was weak with exhaustion, and therefore fretful and panicky. He was afraid of Pae, of Oiie, of a police search party. Everything he had heard, read, half-understood about the Urrasti police, the secret police, came vivid and terrible into his memory, as when a man admitting his illness to himself recalls every word he ever read about cancer. He stared up at Efor in feverish distress.

"You can trust me," the man said in his subdued, wry, quick way. He brought Shevek a glass of water and went out, and the lock of the outer door clicked behind him.

He looked after Shevek during the next two days, with a tact that owed little to his training as a servant.

"Yov. should have been a doctor, Efor," Shevek said, when his weakness had become a merely bodily, not unpleasant lassitude.

**What my old sow say. She never wants nobody nurse her beside me when she get the pip. She say, 'You got the touch.' I guess I do,"

"Did you ever work with the sick?"

"No sir. Don't want to mix up with hospitals. Black day the day I got to die in one of them pest-holes."

"The hospitals? What's wrong with them?"

"Nothing, sir, not them you be took to if you was worse," Efor said with gentleness.

"What kind did you mean, then?"

"Our kind. Dirty. Like a trashman's ass-hole," Efor

said, without violence, descriptively. "Old. Kid die in one.

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There's holes in the floor, big holes, the beams show through, see? I say, 'HOW come?* See, rats come up the holes, right in the beds. They say. 'Old building, been a hospital six hundred years.* Stablishment of the Divine Harmony for the Poor, its name. An ass-hole what it is."

"It was your child that died in the hospital?**

"Yes, sir, my daughter Laia."

"What did she die of?"

"Valve in her heart. They say. She don't grow much.

Two years old when she die."

"You have other children?"

**Not living. Three born. Hard on the old sow. But now she say. *0h, well, don't have to be heartbreaking over 'em, just as well after all!* Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?" The sudden switch to upper-class syntax jolted Shevek; he said impatiently. "Yes! Go on talking."

Because he had spoken spontaneously, or because he was unwell and should be humored, this time Efor did not stiffen up. *Think of going for army medic, one time," he «aid, "but they get me first. Draft. Say, 'Orderly, you be orderly.' So I do. Good training, orderly. Come out of the army straight into gentlemen's service."

"You could have been trained as a medic, in the army?"

The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch. All these things occurred in Efor's reminiscences as commonplaces or as commonplace horrors.

Shevek had to exercise his imagination and summon every scrap of knowledge he had about Urras to understand them at an. And yet they were familiar to him in a way that nothing he had yet seen here was, and he did understand.

This was the Urras he had learned about m school on Anarres. This was the world from which his ancestors had fled, preferring hunger and the desert and endless exile.

This was the world that had formed Odo's mind and had jailed her eight times for speaking it. This was the human

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suffering in which the ideals of his society were rooted, the ground from which they sprang.

It was not "the real Urras." The dignity and beauty of

* the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to

•I- which Efor was native. To him a thinking man's job was

* not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to

* Include and to connect. It was not an easy job.

* "Look tired again, sir," Efor said. "Better rest."

", "No, Fm not tired."

Efor observed him a moment. When Efor functioned as a servant his lined, clean-shaven face was quite expressionless; during the last hour Shevek had seen it go through extraordinary changes of harshness, humor, cynicism, and pain. At the moment its expression was sympathetic yet detached.

"Different from all that where you come from," Efor i said.

f "Very different."

**Nobody ever out of work, there."

* There was a faint edge of irony, or question, in his voice.

* "But we have been hungry. We have starved. There was <;' a famine, you know, eight years ago. I knew a woman

* then who killed her baby, because she had no milk, and

* there was nothing else, nothing else to give it. It is not all

* ... all milk and honey on Anarres, Efor."

i-- "I don't doubt it, sir," Efor said with one of his curious

H returns to polite diction. Then he said with a grimace,

% drawing his lips back from his teeth, "All the same there's

| none of them there!"

S "Them?"

* "You know, Mr. Shevek. What you said once. The

A „

owners."

_?

The next evening Atro called by. Pae must have been on

t the watch, for a few minutes after Efor admitted the old

•* man, he came strolling in, and inquired with charming

) sympathy after Shevek's indisposition- "You've been work-fc. ing much too hard these last couple of weeks, sir,'* he said,

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"you mustn't wear yourself out like this." He did not sit down, but took his leave very soon, the soul of civility. Atro went on talking about the war in Benbili, which was becoming, as he put it, "a large-scale operation."

"Do the people in this country approve of this war?"

Shevek asked, interrupting a discourse on strategy. He had been puzzled by the absence of moral judgment in the birdseed papers on this subject. They had given up their ranting excitement; their wording was often exactly the same as that of the telefax bulletins issued by the government.

"Approve? You don't think we'd lie down and let the damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world power is at stake!"

"But I meant the people, not the government The . . . the people who must fight."

"What's it to them? They're used to mass conscriptions.

It's what they're for, my dear fellow! To fight for their country. And let me tell you, there's no better soldier on earth than the loti man of the ranks, once he's broken in to taking orders. In peacetime he may spout sentimental pacifism, but the grit's there, underneath. The common soldier has always been our greatest resource as a nation. It's how we became the leader we are."

"By climbing up on a pile of dead children?'* Shevek said, but anger or, perhaps, an unadmitted reluctance to hurt the old man's feelings, kept his voice muffled, and Atro did not hear him.

"No," Atro went on, "you'll find the soul of the people true as steel, when the country's threatened. A few rabble-rousers in Nio and the mill towns make a big noise between wars, but it's grand to see how the people close ranks when the flag's in danger. You're unwilling to believe that, I know. The trouble with Odonianism, you know, my dear fellow, is that it's womanish. It simply doesn't include the virile side of life. *Blood and steel, battle's brightness,* as the old poet says. It doesn't understand courage—love of the flag."

Shevek was silent for a minute; then he said, gently,

**That may be true, in part. At least, we have no flags."

When Atro had gone, Efor came in to take out the dinner tray. Shevek stopped him. He came up close to him. saying, "Excuse me, Efor," and put a slip of paper down

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on the tray. On it he had written, "Is there a microphone in this room?"

The servant bent his head and read it, slowly, and then looked up at Shevek, a long look at short range. Thea his eyes glanced for a second at the chimney of the fireplace.

"Bedroom?" Shevek inquired by the same means.

Efor shook his head, put the tray down, and followed Shevek into the bedroom. He shut the door behind him with the noiselessness of a good servant.

"Spotted that one first day, dusting," he said with a grin that deepened the lines on his face into harsh ridges.

"Not ia here?**

Efor shrugged. "Never spotted it. Could run the water in there, sir, like they do in the spy stories."

They proceeded on into the magnificent gold and ivory temple of the shitstool. Efor turned on the taps and then looked around the walls. "No," he said. "Don't think so. And spy eye I could spot Oet onto them when I work for a man in Nio once. Can't miss 'em once you get onto

*em."

Shevek took another piece of paper out of his pocket and showed it to Efor. "Do you know where this came from?"

It was the note he had found in his coat, "Join with us your brothers."

After a pause—he read slowly, moving his closed lips

—Efor said, "I don't know where it come from."

Shevek was disappointed. It had occurred to him that

Efor himself was in an excellent position to slip something

into his "master's" pocket

"Know who it come from. In a manner."

"Who? How can I get to them?"

Another pause. "Dangerous business, Mr. Shevek." He turned away and increased the rush of water from the taps.

"I dont want to involve you. If you can just tell me— tell me where to go. What I should ask for. Even one

name."

A still longer pause. Efor's face looked pinched and hard. "I don't—" he said, and stopped. Then he said, abruptly, and very low, "Look, Mr. Shevek, God knows, they want you, we need you, but look, you don't know

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what it's like. How you going to hide? A man like you?

Looking like you look? This a trap here, but it's a trap anywhere. You can run but you can't hide. I don't know what to tell you. Give you names, sure. Ask any Nioti, he tell you where to go. We had about enough. We got to have some air to breathe. But you get caught, shot, how do I feel? I work for you eight months, I come to like you. To admire you. They approach me all the time. I say, 'No. Let him be. A good man and he got no part of our troubles.

Let him go back where he come from where the people are free. Let somebody go free from this God damned prison we living inl*"

"I cant go back. Not yet. I want to meet these people."

Efor stood silent. Perhaps it was his life's habit as a servant, as one who obeys, that made him no'd at last and say, whispering, "Tuio Maedda, he who you want. In Joking Lane, in Old Town. The grocery." \

"Pae says I am forbidden to leave the campus. They can stop me if they see me take the train."

Taxi, maybe," Efor said. **I call you one, you go down by the stairs. I know Kae Oimon on the stand. He got sense. But I don't know."

"All right Right now. Pae was just here, he saw me, he thinks I'm staying in because I'm ill. What time is it?"

"Half past seven."

"H I go now, I have the night to find where I should "111 pack you a bag, sir—*'

"A bag of what?"

"YouTI need clothes—"

"I'm wearing clothes! Go on.**

**You can't just go with nothing," Efor protested. This made him more anxious and uneasy than anything else.

"You got money?"

"Oh—yes. I should take that."

Shevek was on the move already; Efor scratched his head, looked grim and dour, but went off to the hall phone to call the taxi. He returned to find Shevek waiting outside the hall door with his coat on. "Go downstairs,"

Efor said, grudgingly. "Kae be at the back door, five minutes. Tell him go out by Grove Road, no checkpoint there like at the main gate. Don't go by the gate, they stop you there sure."

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"Will you be blamed for this, Efor?'*

They were both whispering.

"I don't know you gone. Morning, I say you don't get up yet. Sleeping. Keep 'em off a while."

Shevek took him by the shoulders, embraced him, shook his hand. "Thank you, Eforl"

"Good luck," the man said, bewUdered. Shevek was already gone.

Shevek's costly day with Vea had taken most of his ready cash, and the taxi ride in to Nio took ten units more. He got out at a major subway station and by using his map worked his way by subway into Old Town, a section of the city he had never seen. Joking Lane was not on the map, so he got off the train at the central stop for Old Town. When he came up from the spacious marble station into the street he stopped in confusion. This did not look like Nio Esseia.

A fine, foggy rain was falling, and it was quite dark;

there were no street lights. The lampposts were there, but the lights were not turned on, or were broken. Yellow gleams slitted from around shuttered windows here and there. Down the street, light streamed from an open doorway, around which a group of men were lounging, talking loud. The pavement, greasy with rain, was littered with scraps of paper and refuse. The shopfronts, as well as he could make them out, were low, and were all covered up with heavy metal or wooden shutters, except for one which had been gutted by fire and stood black and blank, shards of glass still sticking in the frames of the broken

windows. People went by, silent hasty shadows-

An old woman was coming up the stairs behind him, and he turned to her to ask his way. In the light of the yellow globe that marked the subway entrance he saw her face clearly: white and lined, with the dead, hostile stare of weariness. Big glass earrings bobbed on her cheeks. She climbed the stairs laboriously, hunched over with fatigue or with arthritis or some deformity of the spine. But she was not old, as he had thought; she was not even thirty.

**Can you tell me where Joldng Lane is," he asked her, stammering. She glanced at him with indifference, hurried her pace as she reached the top of the stairs, and went on without a word.

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He set off at random down the street. The excitement of his sudden decision and flight from leu Eun had turned to apprehension, a sense of being driven, hunted. He avoided the group of men around the door, instinct warning him that the single stranger does not approach that kind of group. When he saw a man ahead of him walking alone, he caught up and repeated his question. The man said, "I dont know," and turned aside.

There was nothing to do but go on. He came to a better-lighted cross street, which wound off into the misty rain in both directions in a dim, grim garisaoess of lighted signs and advertisements. There were many wineshops and pawnshops, some of them still open. A good many people were in the street, jostling past, going in and out of the wineshops. There was a man tying down, lying in the gutter, his coat bunched up over his head, lying in the rain, asleep, sick, dead. Shevek stared at him with horror, and at the others who walked past without looking.

As he stood there paralyzed, somebody stopped by him and looked up into his face, a short, unshaven, wry-necked fellow of fifty or sixty, with red-rimmed eyes and a toothless mouth opened in a laugh. He stood and laughed witlessly at the big, terrified man, pointing a shaky hand at him. "Where you get all that hair, eh, en, that hair, where you get all that hair," he mumbled.

"Can—can you tell me how to get to Joking Lane?**

"Sure, joking, I'm joking, no joke I'm broke. Hey you

got a little blue for a drink on a cold night? Sure you got a

little blue."

He came closer. Shevek drew away, seeing the open hand but not understanding.

"Come on, take a joke mister, one little blue," the man 'mumbled without threat or pleading, mechanically, his mouth still open in the meaningless grin, his hand held out

Shevek understood. He groped in his pocket, found the last of his money, thrust it into the beggar's hand, and then, cold with a fear that was not fear for himself, pushed past the man, who was mumbling and trying to catch at his coat, and made for the nearest open door. It was under a sign that read 'Tawn and Used Goods Best Values." Inside, among the racks of wom-out coats, shoes, shawls, battered instruments, broken lamps, odd dishes, canisters,

234

spoons, beads, wrecks and fragments, every piece of rubbish marked with its price, he stood trying to collect himself.

"Looking for something?"

He put his question once more.

The shopkeeper, a dark man as tall as Shevek but atooped and very thin, looked him over. "What you want to get there for?"

"I'm looking for a person who lives there."

"Where you from?"

"I need to get to this street. Joking Lane. Is it far from here?"

"Where you from, mister?*'

"I am from Anarres, from the Moon," Shevek said angrily. "I have to get to Joking Lane, now, tonight."

"You're him? The scientist fellow? What the hell you doing here?"

"Getting away from the police! Do you want to tell them I'm here, or will you help me?"

"God damn," the man said. "God damn. Look—" He hesitated, was about to say something, about to say something else, said, "You Just go on," and in the same breath though apparently with a complete change of mind, said,

"All right. I'm closing. Take you there. Hold on- God danml"

He rummaged in the back of the shop, switched off the light, came outside with Shevek, pulled down metal shutters and locked them, padlocked the door, and set off at a sharp pace, saying, "Come on!"

They walked twenty or thirty blocks, getting deeper into the maze of crooked streets and alleys in the heart of Old Town. The misty rain fell softly in the unevenly lit darkness, bringing out smells of decay, of wet stone and metal. They turned down an unlit, unsigned alley between high old tenements, the ground floors of which were mostly shops. Shevek's guide stopped and knocked on the shuttered window of one: V. Maedda, Fancy Groceries. After a good while the door was opened. The pawnbroker conferred with a person inside, then gestured to Shevek, and they both entered. A girl had let them in. "Tuio's in back. come on," she said, looking up into Shevek's face in the weak light from a back hallway. "Are you him?" Her

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voice was faint and urgent-, she smHed strangely. "Are you really him?"

Tuio. Maedda was a dark man in his forties, with a strained, intellectual face. He shut a book in which he had been writing and got quickly to his feet as they entered. He greeted the pawnbroker by name, but never took his eyes off Shevek.

"He come to my shop asking the way here, Tuio. He say he the, you know, the one from Anarres."

"You are, aren't you?" Maedda said slowly. "Shevek.

What are you doing here?" He stared at Shevek with alarmed, luminous eyes.

"Looking for help."

"Who sent you to me?"

"The first man I asked. I don't know who you are. I asked him where I could go, he said to come to you."

"Does anybody else know you're here?"

"They don't know I've gone. Tomorrow they will.**

"Go get Remeivi," Maedda said to the girl. "Sit down,

Dr. Shevek. You'd better tell me what's going on."

Shevek sat down on a wooden chair but did not unfasten his coat. He was so tired he was shaking. "I escaped," he said. "From the University, from the jail. I don't know where to go. Maybe it's all jails here. I came here because they talk about the lower classes, the working classes, and I thought, that sounds like my people. People who might help each other."

"What kind of help are you looking for?"

Shevek made an effort to pull himself together. He looked around the little, littered office, and at Maedda. "I have something they want," he said. "An idea. A scientific theory. I came here from Anarres because I thought that here I could do the work and publish it. I didn't understand that here an idea is a property of the State. I dont work for a State. I can't take the money and the things they give me. I want to get out. But I can't go home. So I came here. You don't want my science, and maybe you don't like your government either."

Maedda smiled, "No- I don't. But our government don't like me any better. You didn't pick the safest place to come, either for you or for us. ... Don't worry. Tonight's tonight; well decide what to do."

Shevek took out the note he had found in his coat

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pocket and handed it to Maedda. "This is what brought me. Is it from people you know?"

" 'Join with us your brothers. .. .* I don't know. Could be."

"Are you Odonians?**

"Partly. Syndicalists, libertarians. We work with the Thuvianists, the Socialist Workers Union, but we're anticentralist. You arrived at a pretty hot moment, you know."

'The war?"

Maedda nodded. "A demonstration's been announced for three days from now. Against the draft, war taxes, the rise in food prices. There's four hundred thousand unemployed in Nio Esseia, and they jack up taxes and prices."

He had been watching Shevek steadily all the time they talked; now, as if the examination was done, he looked away, leaning back in his chair. "This city's about ready for anything. A strike is what we need, a general strike, and massive demonstrations. Like the Ninth Month Strike that Odo led," he added with a dry, strained smile. "We could use an Odo now. But they've got no Moon to buy us off with this time. We make justice here, or nowhere.'*

He looked back at Shevek, and presently said in a softer voice, "Do you know what your society has meant, here, to us, these last hundred and fifty years? Do you know that when people here want to wish each other luck they say, *May you get reborn on Anarres!' To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation, that they can never say again that it's just a mirage, an idealist's dreami I wonder if you fully understand why they've kept you so well hidden out there at leu Eun, Dr. Shevek.

Why you never were allowed to appear at any meeting open to the public. Why they'll be after you like dogs after a rabbit the moment they find you're gone. It's not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh.

Walking amongst us."

*Then you've got your Odo," the girl said in her quiet, urgent voice. She had re-entered as Maedda was speaking. "After all, Odo was only an idea. Dr. Shevek is the proof."

Maedda was silent for a minute. "An undemonstrable proof," he said.

"Why?"

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*1f people know he's here, the police will know it too."

"Let them come and try to take him," the girl said, and

smiled.

"The demonstration is going to be absolutely nonviolent," Maedda said with sudden violence. "Even the SWU have accepted that!" "I haven't accepted it, Tuio. I'm not going to let my face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the black-coats. If they hurt me, I'll hurt back."

"Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not

achieved by force!"

"And power isn't achieved by passivity.**

**We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! What do you say?" Maedda appealed to Shevek.

"The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! Wa cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!"

Shevek looked at him, at the girl, and at the pawnbroker who stood listening tensely near the door. He said in a tired, quiet voice, "If I would be of use, use roe. Maybe I could publish a statement on this in one of your papers. I did not come to Urras to hide. If all the people know I am here, maybe the government would be afraid to arrest me

in public? I don't know."

"That's it," Maedda said. "Of course.'* His dark eyes blazed with excitement. "Where the devil is Remeivi? Go call his sister, Siro, tell her to hunt him out and get him over here.—Write why you came here, write about Anar" res, write why you won't sell yourself to the government, write what you like—we'll get it printed. Siro! Call Meisthe too.—We'll hide you, but by God we'll let ever man in A-Io know you're here, you're with us!"

The words poured out of him, his hands jerked as he spoke, and he walked quickly back and forth across the room. "And then, after the demonstration, after the strike, we'll see. Maybe things will be different then! Maybe you

won't have to hide!"

"Maybe all the prison doors will fly open," Shevek said.

"Well, give me some paper, I'll write."

The girl Siro came up to him. Smiling, she stooped as if bowing to him, a little timorously, with decorum, and kissed him on the cheek; then she went out. The touch of

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her lips was cool, and he felt it on his cheek for a long time.

He spent one day in the attic of a tenement in Joking Lane, and two nights and a day in a basement under a used-furniture store, a strange dim place full of empty mirror frames and broken bedsteads. He wrote. They brought him what he had written, printed, within a few hours: at first in the newspaper Modem Age, and later, after the Modem Age presses had been closed down and the editors arrested, as handbills run on a clandestine press, along with plans and incitations for the demonstration and general strike. He did not read over what he had written. He did not listen closely to Maedda and the others, who described the enthusiasm with which the papers were read, the spreading acceptance of the plan for the strike, the effect his presence at the demonstration would make in the eyes of the world. When they left him alone, sometimes he took a small notebook from his shirt pocket and looked at the coded notes and equations of the General Temporal Theory. He looked at them and could not read them. He did not understand them. He put the notebook away again and sat with his head between his hands.

Anarres had no flag to wave, but among the placards proclaiming the general strike, and the blue and white banners of the Syndicalists and the Socialist Workers, there were many homemade signs showing the green Circle of life, the old symbol of the Odoman Movement of two hundred years before. All the flags and signs shone bravely in the sunlight.

It was good to be outside, after the rooms with locked doors, the hiding places. It was good to be walking, swinging his aims, breathing the clear air of a spring morning.

To be among so many people, so immense a crowd, thousands marching together, filling all the side streets as well as the broad thoroughfare down which they marched, was frightening, but it was exhilarating too. When they sang, both the exhilaration and the fear became a blind exaltation; he eyes filled with tears. It was deep, in the deep streets, softened by open air and by distances, indistinct, overwhelming, that lifting up of thousands of voices in one song. The singing of the front of the march, far away

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up the street, and of the endless crowds coming on behind, was put out of phase by the distance the sound must travel, so that the melody seemed always to be lagging and catching up with itself, like a canon, and all the parts of the song were being sung at one time, in the same moment, though each singer sang the tune as a line from beginning to end.

He did not know their songs, and only listened and was borne along on the music, until from up front there came sweeping back wave by wave down the great slow-moving river of people a tune he knew. He lifted his head and sang it with them, in his own language as he had learned it: the Hymn of the Insurrection. It had been sung in these streets, in this same street, two hundred years ago, by these people, his people.

0 eastern light, awaken Those who have slept!

The darkness will be broken,

The promise kept.

They fell silent in the ranks around Shevek to hear him, and he sang aloud, smiling, walking forward with them.

There might have been a hundred thousand human beings in Capitol Square, or twice that many. The individuals, like the particles of atomic physics, could not be counted, nor their positions ascertained, nor their behavior predicted. And yet, as a mass, that enormous mass did what it had been expected to do by the organizers of the strike: it gathered, marched in order, sang, filled Capitol Square and all the streets around, stood in its numberlessness restless yet patient in the bright noon listening to the speakers, whose single voices, erratically amplified, clapped and echoed off the sunlit facades of the Senate and the Directorate, rattled and hissed over the continuous, soft, vast murmur of the crowd itself.

There were more people standing here in the Square

than lived in all Abbenay, Shevek thought, but the thought

was meaningless, an attempt to quantify direct experience.

He stood with Maedda and the others on the steps of the Directorate, in front of the columns and the tall bronze doors, and looked out over the tremulous, somber field of

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faces, and listened as they listened to the speakers: not hearing and understanding in the sense in which the individual rational mind perceives and understands, but rather as one looks at, listens to one's own thoughts, or as a thought perceives and understands the self. When he spoke, speaking was little different from listening. No conscious will of his own moved him, no self-consciousness was in him. The multiple echoes of his voice from distant loudspeakers and the stone fronts of the massive buildings, however, distracted him a little, making him hesitate at times and speak very slowly. But he never hesitated for words. He spoke their mind, their being, in their language, though he said no more than he had said out of his own isolation, out of the center of his own being, a long time ago.

"It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing.

You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

"I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city —the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must

come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any prop-

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erty, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."

As he finished speaking the clattering racket of police helicopters drawing near began to drown out his voice.

He stood back from the microphones and looked upward, squinting into the sun. As many of the crowd did so the movement of their heads and hands was like the passage of wind over a sunlit field of gram.

The noise of the rotating vanes of the machines in the huge stone box of Capitol Square was intolerable, a clacking and yapping like the voice of a monstrous robot. It drowned out the chatter of the machine guns fired from the helicopters. Even as the crowd noise rose up in tumult the clack of the helicopters was still audible through it, the mindless yell of weaponry, the meaningless word.

The helicopter fire centered on the people who stood on or nearest the steps of the Directorate. The columned portico of the building offered immediate refuge to those on the steps, and within moments ft was jammed solid.

The noise of the crowd, as people pressed in panic toward the eight streets that led out of Capitol Square, rose up into a wailing like a great wind. The helicopters were close overhead, but there was no telling whether they had ceased firing or were still firing; the dead and wounded ia the crowd were too close pressed to fall.

The bronze-sheathed doors of the Directorate gave with a crash that no one heard. People pressed and trampled toward them to get to shelter, out from under the metal rain. They pushed by hundreds into the high halls of marble, some cowering down to hide in the first refuge they saw, others pushing on to find a way through the building and out the back, others staying to wreck what they could until the soldiers came. When they came, marching in their neat black coats up the steps among dead and dying men and women, they found on the high, grey, polished wall of the great foyer a word written at the height of a man's eyes, in broad smears of blood: DOWN

They shot the dead man who lay nearest the word, and later on when the Directorate was restored to order the

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i I

1 »

word was washed off the wall with water, soap, and rags but it remained; it had been spoken; it bad meaning.

He realized it was impossible to go any farther with his' companion, who was getting weak, beginning to stumble.

There was nowhere to go, except away from Capitol Square. There was nowhere to stop, either. The crowd had twice rallied in Mesee Boulevard, trying to present a front to the police, but the army's armored cars came behind the police and drove the people forward, towards Old Town. The blackcoats had not fired either time, though the noise of guns could be heard oo other streets. The clacking helicopters cruised up and down above the streets; one could not get out from under them.

His companion was breathing in sobs, gulping for air ad he struggled along. Shevek had been half-carrying him for several blocks, and they were now far behind the main mass of the crowd. There was no use trying to catch up. "Here, sit down here," he told the man, and helped him tw sit down on the top step of a basement entry to some kind of warehouse, across the shuttered windows of which the. word STRIKE was chalked in huge letters. He went down to the basement door and tried it; it was locked. All doors were locked. Property was private. He took a piece of paving stone that had come loose from a corner of the steps and smashed the hasp and padlock off the door> working neither furtively nor vindictively, but with the assurance of one unlocking his own front door. He looked in. The basement was full of crates and empty of people. He helped his companion down the steps, shut the door behind them, and said, "Sit here, lie down if you want. I'll see if there's water."

The place, evidently a chemical warehouse, had a row of washtubs as well as a hose system for fires, Shevek's companion had fainted by the time he got back to him*

He took the opportunity to wash the man's hand with a;

trickle from the hose and to get a look at his wound. It was worse than he had thought. More then one bullet must have struck it, tearing two fingers off and mangling the palm and wrist. Shards of splintered bone stuck out like toothpicks. The man had been standing near Shevek and Maedda when the helicopters began firing and, hit, had lurched against Shevek, grabbing at him for support.

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Shevek had kept an arm around him all through the

escape through the Directorate; two could keep afoot better"

than one in the first wild press.

He did what he could to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet and to bandage, or at least cover, the destroyed hand, and he got the man to drink some water. He did not know his name; by his white armband he was a Socialist Worker; he looked to be about Shevek's age» forty, or a little older.

At the mills in Southwest Shevek had seen men hurt much worse than this in accidents and had learned that

people may endure and survive incredibly much in the way of gross injury and pain. But there they had been looked after. There had been a surgeon to amputate^ plasma to compensate blood loss, a bed to lie down in.

He sat down on the floor beside the man, who now lay semiconscious in shock, and looked around at the stacks of crates, the long dark afleys between them, the whitish gleam of daylight from the barred window slits along the front wall, the white streaks of saltpeter on the ceiling, the tracks of workmen's boots and dolly wheels on the dusty cement floor. One hour hundreds of thousands of people singing under the open sky; the next hour two men hiding in a basement.

"You are contemptible," Shevek said in Pravic to his companion. "You cannot keep doors open. You will never be free." He felt the man's forehead gently; it was cold and sweaty. He loosened the tourniquet for a while, then got up, crossed the murky basement to the door, and went up onto the street. The fleet of armored cars had passed.

A very few stragglers of the demonstration went by, hurrying, their heads down, in enemy territory. Shevek tried to stop two; a third finally halted for him. "I need a doctor, there is a man hurt. Can you send a doctor back here?"

"Better get him out."

"Help me carry him."

The man hurried on. "They coming through here," he called back over his shoulder. "You better get out."

No one else came by, and presently Shevek saw a line of blackcoats far down the street He went back down into the basement, shut the door, returned to the wounded man's side, sat down on the dusty floor. "Hell," he said.

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After a while he took the little notebook out of his shirt pocket and began to study it.

In the afternoon, when he cautiously looked outside, he saw an armored car stationed across the street and two others slewed across the street at the crossing. That explained the shouts he had been hearing: it would be soldiers giving orders to each other.

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains ... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief.

Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency—a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerillas, organized from below, self-disciplined, "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own—you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he Still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.

He occasionally spoke to his companion, too, as it got darker. The man was lying now with his eyes open, and he moaned a couple of times in a way that touched Shevek, a childish, patient sort of moan. He had made a gallant effort to keep up and keep going, all the time they were in the first panic of the crowd forcing into and through

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the Directorate, and running, and then walking towards Old Town; he had held the hurt hand under his coat, pressed against his side, and had done his best to keep going and not to hold Shevek back. The second time he moaned, Shevek took his good hand and whispered.

•"Don't, don't. Be quiet, brother," only because he could Dot bear to hear the man's pain and not be able to do anything for him. The man probably thought he meant he should be quiet lest he give them away to the police, for he nodded weakly and shut his Ups together.

The two of them endured there three nights. During all that time there was sporadic fighting in the warehouse district, and the army blockade remained across that block of Mesee Boulevard. The fighting never came very close to it, and it was strongly manned, so the men in (hiding had no chance to get out without surrendering themselves. Once when his companion was awake Shevek asked him,

"'If we went out to the police what would they do with us?"

The man smiled and whispered, "Shoot us."

As there had been scattered gunfire around, near and far, for hours, and an occasional solid explosion, and the clacking of the helicopters, his opinion seemed well founded. The reason for his smile was less clear.

He died of loss of blood that night, while they lay side by side for warmth on the mattress Shevek had made from packing-crate straw. He was already stiff when Shevek woke, and sat up, and listened to the silence in the great dark basement and outside on the street and in all the city, a silence of death.

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Rail lines in Southwest ran for the most part on embankments a meter or more above the plain. There was less dust drift on an elevated roadbed, and it gave travelers a good view of desolation.

Southwest was the only one of the eight Divisions of Anarres that lacked any major body of water. Marshes were formed by polar melt in summer in the far south;

towards the equator there were only shallow alkaline lakes in vast salt pans. There were no mountains; every hundred kilometers or so a chain of hills ran north-south, barren, cracked, weathered into cliffs and pinnacles,

They were streaked with violet and red, and on cliff faces the rockmoss, a plant that lived in any extreme of heat, cold, aridity, and wind, grew in bold verticals of grey-green, making a plaid with the striations of the sandstone. There was no other color in the landscape but dun, fading to whitish where salt pans lay half covered with sand. Rare thunderclouds moved over the plains, vivid white in the purplish sky. They cast no rain, only shadows. The embankment and the glittering rails ran straight behind the truck train to the end of sight and straight before it to the end of sight.

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Nothing you can do with Southwest," said the driver,

"but get across it."

His companion did not answer, having fallen asleep. His head jiggled to the vibration of the engine. His hands, work-hard and blackened by frostbite, lay loose on his thighs; his face in relaxation was lined and sad. He had hitched the ride in Copper Mountain, and since there were no other passengers the driver had asked him to ride in the cab for company. He had gone to sleep at once. The driver glanced at him from time to time with disappointment but sympathy. He had seen so many worn-out people in the last years that it seemed the normal condition to him.

Late in the long afternoon the man woke up, and after staring out at the desert a while be asked, "You always do this run alone?"

"Last three, four years."

"Ever break down out here?"

"Couple of times. Plenty of rations and water in the locker. You hungry, by the way?"

"Not yet."

"They send down the breakdown rig from Lonesome within a day or so."

*That'& the next settlement?"

"Right Seventeen hundred kilometers from Sedep Mines to Lonesome. Longest run between towns on Anarres. I've been doing it for eleven years."

"Not tired of it?"

"No. Like to run a Job by myself."

The passenger nodded agreement.

"And it's steady. I like routine; you can think. Fifteen days on the run, fifteen off with the partner in New Hope.

Year in, year out; drought, famine, whatever. Nothing changes, it's always drought down here. I like the run. Get the water out, will you? Cooler's back underneath the locker."

They each had a long swig from the bottle. The water

had a flat, alkaline taste, but was cool. "Ah, that's goodi"

the passenger said gratefully. He put the bottle away

and, returning to his seat in the front of the cab, stretched,

bracing his hands against the roof. "You're a partnered

man, then," he said. There was a simplicity in the way

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he said it that the driver liked, and he answered, "Eighteen years."

"Just starting."

**By damn, I agree with that! Now that's what some doa't see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around enough in your teens, thafs when you get the most out of it, and- also you find out that it's all pretty much the same damn thing. And a good thing, tool But still, what's different isn't the copulating; it's the other person. And eighteen years is just a start, all right, when it comes to figuring out that difference. At least, if it's a woman you're trying to figure out A woman won't let on to being so puzzled by a man, but maybe they bluff. . . .Anyhow, that's the pleasure of it The puzzles and the bluffs and the rest of it. The variety. Variety doesnt come with just moving around. I was all over Anarres, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I came back here, and I do this run every three decads year in year out through this same desert where you cant ten one sandhill from the next and it's all the same for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and go home to the same partner—and I never been bored once. It isnt changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It's getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it"

"That's it." said the passenger.

'•Where's the partner?"

"In Northeast Pour years now."

*That's too long," the driver said. "You should have been posted together."

"Not where I was.**

"Where's that?"

"Elbow, and then Grand Valley."

**I heard about Grand Valley." He now looked at the passenger with the respect due a survivor. He saw the dry look of the man's tanned skin, a kind of weathering to the bone, which he had seen in others who had come through the famine years in the Dust "We shouldn't have tried to keep those mills running."

"Needed the phosphates."

"But they say, when the provisions train was stopped in Portal, they kept the mills going, and people died of

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hunger on the Job. Just went a little out of the way and lay down and died. Was it like that?"

The man nodded. He said nothing. The driver pressed no further, but said after a while, "I wondered what I'd do if my train ever got mobbed."

"It never did?"

"No. See, I don't carry foodstuff's; one truckload, at most, for Upper Sedep. This is an ores run. But if I got on a provisions run, and they stopped roe, what would I do? Run *em down and get the food to where it ought to go? But hell, you going to run down kids, old men?

They're doing wrong but you going to kill em for it? I don't know!*'

The straight shining rails ran under the wheels. 'Clouds in the west laid great shivering mirages on the plain, the shadows of dreams of lakes gone dry ten million years ago.

"A syndic, fellow Fve known for years, he did just that, north of here, in '66. They tried to take a grain truck off. his train. He backed the train, killed a couple of them before they cleared the track, they were like worms in rotten fish, thick, he said. He said, there's eight hundred people waiting for that grain truck, and how many of them might die if they don't get it? More than a couple, a lot more. So it looks like he was right But by damni I can't add up figures like that I don't know if ifs right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kfll?"

*The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got rufl rations—just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations.

K they were sick or too weak to work, they got half.

On half rations you couldnt get well. You couldn't get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick.

I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them, I earned them by making lists of who should starve." The man's light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. "Like you said, I was to count people."

"You quit?" '*Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else

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took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There's always somebody willing to make lists."

"Now that's wrong," the driver said, scowling into the glare. He had a bald brown face and scalp, no hair left between cheeks and occiput, though he wasn't past his middle forties. It was a strong, hard, and innocent face. "That's dead wrong. They should have shut the mills down.

You can't ask a man to do that. Arent we Odonians? A man can lose kis temper, all right That's what the people who mobbed trains did. They were hungry, the kids were hungry, been hungry too long, there's food coming through and its not for you. you lose your temper and go for it.

Same thing with the friend, those people were taking

apart the train he was in charge of, lie lost his temper and

put it in reverse. He didn't count any noses. Not then!

Later, maybe. Because he was sick when he saw what he'd done. But what they had you doing, saying this one lives and that one dies—that's not a Job a person has a right to do, or ask anybody else to do."

"It's been a bad time, brother," the passenger said gently, watching the glaring plain where the shadows of water wavered and drifted with the wind.

The old cargo dirigible wallowed over the mountains and moored in at the airport on Kidney Mountain. Three passengers got off there. Just as the last of them touched ground, the ground picked itself up and bucked. ''Earthquake," he remarked; he was a local coming home.

**Damn, look at that dustt Someday we'n come down here and there wont be any mountain."

Two of the passengers chose to wait till the trucks were loaded and ride with them. Shevek chose to walk, since the local said that Chakar was only about six kilometers down the mountain.

The road went in a series of long curves with a short rise at the end of each. The rising slopes to the left of the road and the falling slopes to tke right were thick with scrub holum; Hues of tall tree holum, spaced Just as if they had been planted, followed veins of ground water along the mountainsides. At the crest of a rise Shevek saw the clear gold of sunset above the dark and many-folded hills.

There was no sign of mankind here except the road itself, going down into shadow. As he started down, the air grum-

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bled a little and he felt a strangeness: no yHt, no tremor, but a displacement, a conviction that things were wrong.

He completed the step he had been making, and the ground was there to meet his foot He went on; the road 'stayed lying down. He had been in no danger, but he had never in any danger known himself ao close to death.

Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind. Shevek felt the cold, clean air

In his mouth and lungs. He listened. Remote, a mountain torrent thundered somewhere down in the shadows.

He came in the late dusk to Chakar. The sky was dark violet over the black ridges. Street lamps flared bright and lonely. Housefronts looked sketchy in the artificial' light, the wilderness dark behind them. There were many empty lots, many single houses: an old town, a frontier town, isolated, scattered. A woman passing directed Shevek to Domicile Eight: 'That way, brother, past the hospital, the end of the street." The street ran into the dark under the mountainside and ended at the door of a low building. He entered and found a country-town domicile foyer that took him back to his childhood, to the places in Liberty, Drum Mountain. Wide Plains, where he and his father had lived:

the dim light, the patched matting; a leaflet describing a local machinists training group, a notice of syndicate meetings, and a flyer for a performance of a play three decads ago, tacked to the announcement board; a framed amateur painting of Odo in prison over the common-room sofa; a homemade harmonium; a list of residents and a notice of hot-water hours at the town baths posted by the door.

Sherut, Takver. No. 3.

He knocked, watching the reflection of the haQ light m the dark surface of the door, which did not hang quite true in its frame. A woman said, "Come int" He opened the door.

The brighter light in the room was behind her. He could not see well enough for a moment to be sure it was Takver. She stood facing him. She reached out, as if to push him away or to take hold of him, an uncertain, unfinished gesture. He took her hand, and men they held each other, they came together and stood holding each other on the unreliable earth*

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"Come in," Takver said, "oh come in, come in."

Shevek opened his eyes. Farther into the room, which Btui seemed very bright, be saw the serious, watchful face of a small child.

"Sadik, this is Shevek.'*

The child went to Takver, took hold of her leg, and burst into tears.

"But don't cry, why are you crying, little soul?"

**Why are you?** the child whispered.

"Because I'm happy! Only because Fro happy. Sit on my lap. But Shevek, Shevekl The letter from you only came yesterday. I was going to go by the telephone when I took Sadik home to sleep. You said you'd call tonight. Not come tonight! Oh, don't cry. Sadiki, look, I'm not any more, am I?**

*The man cried too."

**0f course I did."

Sadik looked at him with mistrustful curiosity. She was four years old. She had a round head, a round face, she was round, dark, furry, soft.

There was no furniture in the room but the two bed platforms. Takver had sat down on one with Sadik on her lap, Shevek sat down on the other and stretched out his legs. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, and held the knuckles out to show Sadik. "See," he said, "they're wet. And the nose dribbles. Do you keep a handkerchief?"

"Yes. Don't you?"

"I did, but it got lost in a washhouse.**

"You can share the handkerchief I use," Sadik said after a pause.

"He doesnt know where it is," said Takver.

Sadik got off her mother's lap and fetched a handkerchief from a drawer in the closet. She gave it to Takver, who passed it across to Shevek. "It's clean,'* Takver said, with her large smile. Sadik watched closely while Sbevek wiped his nose.

"Was there an earthquake here a little while ago?" he asked.

"It shakes all the time, you really stop noticing," Takver said, but Sadik, delighted to dispense information, said in her high but husky voice, "Yes, there was a big one before dinner. When there's an earthquake the windows go gliggle

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and the floor waves, and you ought to go into the doorway or outside."

Shevek looked at Takver; she returned the look. She had aged more than four years. She had never had very good teeth, and now had lost two, just back of the upper eye-teeth, so that the gaps showed when she souled. Her skin no longer had the fine taut surface of youth, and her hair, pulled back neatly, was dull.

Shevek saw clearly that Takver had lost her young grace, and looked a plain, tired woman near the middle of her life. He saw this more clearly than anyone else could have seen it He saw everything about Takver in a way that no one else could have seen it, from the standpoint of years of intimacy and years of longing. He saw her as she was.

Their eyes met

"How—how's it been going here?" he asked, reddening

all at once and obviously speaking at random. She felt the

palpable wave, the outrush of his desire. She also flushed slightly, and smiled. She said in her husky voice, "Oh, same as when we talked on the phone."

"That was six decads ago!"

"Things go along pretty much the same here.

"It's very beautiful here—the hills." He saw in Takver's eyes the darkness of the mountain valleys. The acuteness of his sexual desire grew abruptly, so that he was dizzy for a moment, then he got over the crisis temporarily and tried to command his erection to subside. "Do you think youll want to stay here?" he said.

"I dont care," she said, in her strange, dark, husky voice,

"Your nose is stiH dribbling," Sadik remarked, keenly, but without emotional bias.

"Be glad that's all," Shevek said. Takver said, "Hush,

Sadik, dont egoizel" Both the adults laughed. Sadik continued to study Shevek.

"I do like the town, Shev. The people are nice—all characters. But the work isn't much. It's just lab work in the hospital. The shortage of technicians is just about over, I could leave soon without leaving them in the lurch. I'd like to go back to Abbenay, if you were thinking of that Have you got a repeating?"

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"Didn't ask for one and haven't checked. I've been on the road for a decad."

"What were you doing on the road?" traveling on it, Sadik."

*'He was coming from half across the world, from the south, from the deserts, to come to us," Takver said. The child smiled, settled herself more comfortably on her lap, and yawned.

"Have you eaten, Shev? Are you worn out? I must get this child to bed, we were just thinking of leaving when you knocked."

"She sleeps in the dormitory already?'*

"Since the beginning of this quarter.'*

"I was four already," Sadik stated.

"You say, I am four already," said Takver, dumping her off gently in order to get her coat from the closet Sadik stood up, in profile to Shevek; she was extremely conscious of him, and directed her remarks towards him.

"But I was four, now I'm more than four."

"A temporali&t, like the fatheri"

''You can't be four and more than four at the same

time, can you?" the child asked, sensing approbation, and now speaking directly to Shevek.

"Oh, yes, easily. And you can be four and nearly five at the same time, too." Sitting on the low platform, he could hold his head on a level with the child's so that she did not have to look up at him. "But I'd forgotten that you were nearly five, you see. When I last saw you you were hardly more than nothing."

"Really?" Her tone was indubitably flirtatious.

"Yes. You were about so long." He held his hands not very far apart.

"Could I talk yet?"

"You said waa, and a few other things."

**Did I wake up everybody in the dom like Cheben^a baby?" she inquired, with a broad, gleeful smile.

"Of course."

"When did I leam how to really talk?"

"At about one half year old," said Takver, "and you

learning-center dormitory and toofc her into the lobby. It was a little, shabby place too, but brightened by children's paintings, several fine brass model engines, and a litter of toy houses and painted wooden people. Sadik kissed her mother good night, then turned to Shevek and put up her arms; he stooped to her; she kissed him matter-of-factly but firmly, and said, "Good night!" She went off with the night attendant, yawning. They heard her voice, the attendant's mild hushing.

"She's beautiful, Takver. Beautiful, intelligent, sturdy.** "She's spoiled, I'm afraid."

**No, no. You've done well, fantastically well—in such a time—'*

"It hasn't been so bad here, not the way it was'in the south,'* she said, looking up into his face as they left the dormitory. "Children were fed, here. Not very well, but enough. A community here can grow food. If nothing else there's the scrub holum. You can gather wild holum seeds and pound them for meal. Nobody starved here. But I did spoil Sadik. I nursed her till she was three, of course, why not when there was nothing good to wean her to! But they disapproved, at the research station at Rolny. They wanted me to put her in the nursery there full time. They said I was being propertarian about the child and not contributing full strength to the social effort in the crisis. They were right, really. But they were so righteous. None of them understood about being lonely. They were all groupers. no characters. It was the women who nagged me about nursing. Real body profiteers. I stuck it out there because the food was good—trying out the algaes to see if they were palatable, sometimes you got quite a lot over standard rations, even if it did taste like glue—until they could replace me with somebody who fitted in better. Then I went to Fresh Start for about ten decads. That was winter, two years ago, that long time the mail didn't get through, when things were so bad where you were. At Fresh Start I saw this posting listed, and came here. Sadik stayed with me in the dom till this autumn. I still miss her. The room's so silent.**

"Isn't there a roommate?"

**Sherut, she's very nice, but she works night shift at the hospital. It was time Sadik went, it's good for her living with the other children. She was getting shy. She was very

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good about going there, very stoical. Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don't whine like so many adults."

They walked along aide by side. The autumn stars had come out, incredible in number and brilliance, twinkling and almost blinking because of the dust stirred up by the earthquake and the wind, so that the whole sky seemed to tremble, a shaking of diamond chips, a scintillation of sunlight on a black sea. Under that uneasy splendor the hills were dark and solid, the roofs hard-edged, the light of the street lamps mild.

"Four yeara ago," Shevek said. *1t was four years ago that I came back to Abbenay, from that place in South' rising—what was it called?—Red Springs. It was a night like this, windy, the stars. I ran, I ran all the way from Plains Street to the domicile. And you weren't there, you'd gone. Four years!"

"The moment I left Abbenay I knew I'd been a fool to go. Famine or no famine. I should have refused the posting."

"It wouldn't have made much difference. Sabid was waiting to tell me I was through at the Institute.'*

"If Fd been there, you wouldn't have gone down to the Dust."

"Maybe not, but we mightn't have kept postings together. For a while it seemed as if nothing could hold together, didn't it? The towns in Southwest—there weren't any children left in them. There still aren't. They sent them north, into regions where there was local food, or a chance of it And they stayed to keep the mines and mills going. It's a wonder we pulled through, all of us, isnt it? ... But by damn, I will do my own work for a while nowl"

She took his arm. He stopped short, as if her touch had electrocuted him on the spot She shook him, smiling. "You didn't eat, did you?"

"No. Oh Takver, I have been sick for you, sick for youl**

They came together, holding on to each other fiercely, in the dark street between the lamps, under the stars. They broke apart as suddenly, and Shevek backed up against the nearest wafl. "I'd better eat something," he said, and Takver said, "Yes, or you'll fall flat on your facel Come on." They went a block to the commons, the largest

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buHding in Chakar. Regular dinner wa& over, but the cooks were eating, and provided the traveler a bowl of stew and all the bread ke wanted. They all sat at the table nearest the kitchen. The other tables had already been cleaned and set for next morning. The big room was cavernous, the ceiling rising into shadow, the far end obscure except where a bowl or cup winked on a dark table, catching the light The cooks and servers were a quiet crew, tired after the day*s work; they ate fast, not talking much* not paying much attention to Takver and the stranger. One after another they finished and got up to take their dishes to the washers in the kitchen. One old woman said as she got up, "Dont hurry, ammari, they've got an hour's washing yet to do.*' She had a grim face and looked dour, not maternal, not benevolent; but she spoke with compassion, with the charity of equals. She could do nothing for them but say, ^TDon't hurry," and look at them for a moment with the look of brotherly love.

They could do no more for her, and little more for each other.

They went back to Domicile Eight, Room 3, and there their long desire was fulfilled. They did not even light the lamp; they both liked making love in darkness. The first time they both came as Shevek came into her, the second time they struggled and cried out in a rage of joy, prolonging their climax as if delaying the moment of death, the third time they were both half asleep, and circled about the center of infinite pleasure, about each other's being, like planets circling blindly, quietly, in the flood of sunlight, about the common center of gravity, swinging, circling endlessly.

Takver woke at dawn. She leaned on her elbow and looked across Shevek at the grey square of the window, and then at him. He lay on his back, breathing so quietly that his chest scarcely moved, his face thrown back a little, remote and stem in me thin light We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the difference of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge

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with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back....

Takver put in notice of departure at the hospital in Chakar, but stayed till they could replace her in the laboratory. She worked her eight-hour shift—in the third quarter of the year 168 many people were still on the long work shifts of emergency postings, for though the drought had broken in the winter of 167, the economy had by no means returned to normal yet. "Long post and short commons" was still the rule for people in skilled work, but the food was now adequate to the day's work, which had not been true a year ago and two years ago.

Shevek did not do much of anything for a while. He did not consider himself ill; after the four years of famine everyone was so used to the effects of hardship and malnutrition that they took them as the norm. He had the dust cough that was endemic in southern desert communities, a chronic irritation of the bronchia similar to silicosis and other miners' diseases, but this was also something one took for granted where he had been living. He simply enjoyed the fact that if he felt like doing nothing, there was nothing he had to do.

For a few days he and Sherut shared the room daytimes, both of them sleeping till late afternoon; then She-rut, a placid woman of forty, moved in with another woman who worked night shift, and Shevek and Takver had the room to themselves for the four decads they stayed on in Chakar. While Takver was at work he slept, or walked out in the fields or on the dry, bare hills above the town. He went by the learning center late in the afternoon and watched Sadik and the other children on the playgrounds, or got involved, as adults often did, in one of the children's projects—a group of mad seven-year-old carpenters, or a pair of sober twelve-year-old' surveyors having trouble with triangulation. Then he walked with Sadik to the room; they met Takver as she got off work and went to the baths together and to commons. An hour or two after dinner he and Takver took the child back to her dormitory and returned to the room. The days were utterly peaceful, in the autumn sunlight, in the si-

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lence of the hills. It was to Shevek a time outside time, beside the flow, unreal, enduring, enchanted. He and Takver sometimes talked very late; other nights they went to bed not Ions after dark and slept nine hours, ten hours, in the profound, crystalline silence of the mountain night.

He had come with luggage: a tattered little fiber-board case, his name printed large on it in black ink; all Anar-resti carried papers, keepsakes, the spare pair of boots, in the same kind of case when they .traveled, orange fiber-board, well scratched and dented. His contained a new Shirt he had picked up as he came through Abbenay, a couple of books and some papers, and a curious object, which as it lay in the case appeared to consist of a series of

flat loops of wire and a few glass beads. He revealed this, with some mystery, to Sadik, his second evening there.

"It's a necklace," the child said with awe. People in the small towns wore a good deal of jewelry. In sophisticated Abbenay there was more sense of the tension between the principle of nonownership and the impulse to self-adornment, and there a ring or pin was the limit of good taste. But elsewhere the deep connection between the aesthetic and the acquisitive was simply not worried about; people bedecked themselves unabashedly. Most districts had a professional jeweler who did his work for love and fame, as well as the craft shops, where you could make to suit your own taste with the modest materials offered—copper, silver, beads, spinels, and the garnets and yellow diamonds of Southrising. Sadik had not seen many bright, delicate things, but she knew necklaces, and so identified it.

"No: look," her father said, and with solemnity and deftnesa raised the object by the thread that connected its several loops. Hanging from his hand it came alive, the loops turning freely, describing airy spheres one within the other, the glass beads catching the lamplight.

"Oh, beauty!" the child said. '•What is it?"

It hangs from the ceiling; is there a nail? The coat hook will do, till I can get a nail from Supplies. Do you know who made it, Sadik?"

^o— You did."

"She did. The mother. She did." He turned to Takver.

"It's my favorite, the one that was over the desk. I gave the others to Bedap. I wasn't going to leave them there

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for old what's-her-name. Mother Envy down the corridor."

"Oh—Bunub! I hadn't thought of her in years'" Takver laughed shakily. She looked at the mobile as if she was afraid of it.

Sadik stood watching it as it fumed silently seeking its balance. "I wish," she said at last, carefully, "that I could share it one night over the bed I sleep in in the dormitory."

"I'll make one for you, dear souL For every night."

"Can you really make them, Takver?"

"Well, I used to. I think I could make you one." The tears were now plain in Takver*s eyes. Shevek put his arms around her. They were both still on edge, overstrained.

Sadik looked at them holding each other for a moment with a calm, observing eye, then returned to watching the Occupation of Uninhabited Space-When they were alone, evenings, Sadik was often the subject of their talk. Takver was somewhat overabsorbed in the child, for want of other intimacies, and her

strong common sense was obscured by maternal ambitions and anxieties. This was not natural to her; neither competitiveness nor protectiveness was a strong motive in Anarresti life. She was glad to talk her worries out and get rid of them, which Shevek's presence enabled her to do. The first nights, she did most of the talking, and he listened as be might have listened to music or to running water, without trying to reply. He had not talked very much, for four years now; he was out of the habit of conversation. She released him from that silence, as she had always done. Later, it was he who talked the most, though always dependent on her response.

"Do you remember Tirin?" he asked one night. It was cold; winter had arrived, and the room, the farthest from the domicile furnace, never got very warm, even with the register wide open. They had taken the bedding from both platforms and were well cocooned together on the platform nearer the register. Shevek was wearing a very old, much-washed shirt to keep his chest warm, as he liked to sit up in bed. Takver, wearing nothing, was under the blankets from the ears down. "What became of the orange blanket?" she said.

"What a propertarian! I left it"

"To Mother Envy? How sad. I'm not a propertarian. I'm Just sentimental. It was the first blanket we slept under."

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**No, it wasnt We must have used a blanket up b the Ne Theraa."

"If we did, I don't remember it" Takver laughed. "Who did you ask about?"

"Tirin."

"Dont remember.*

"At Northsetting Regional. Dark boy, snub nose—w "Oh, Tirint Of course. I was thinking of Abbenay."

**I saw tun, in Southwest."

"You saw Tirin? How was he?"

Shevek said nothing for a while, tracing out the weave erf the blanket with one finger. "Remember what Bedap told us about him?"

"That he kept getting kleggich postings, and moving around, and finally went to Segvina Island, didn't he? And •then Dap lost track of him."

"Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?"

"At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I dont remember it, that's so long ago now. It was silly. Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that's right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anan-es. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he's holding so many he can't move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she's just wide open and ready, but he can't do it until he's given her his gold nuggete first, to pay her. And she didn't want them.

That waa funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he'd leap up like he'd been bitten, saying, 'I must not! It is not moral! It is not good businessr Poor TirinI He was so funny, and so alive.**

"He played the Urrasti?"

"Yes. He was marvelous.'*

"He showed me the play. Several times."

"Where did you meet him? In Grand Valley?" j

"No, before, in Elbow. He was janitor for the mill.'*

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"Had he chosen that?**

"I don't think Tir was able to choose at all, by then... ,

Bedap always thought that he was forced to go to Segvina, that he was bullied into asking for therapy. I don't know.

When I saw him, several years after therapy, he was a destroyed person."

"You think they did something at Segvina—?"

"I don't know; I think the Asylum does try to offer shelter, a refuge. To judge from their syndical publications, they're at least altruistic. I doubt that they drove Tir over the edge."

"But what did break him, then? Just not finding a posting he wanted?"

"The play broke him."

'The play? The fuss those old turds made about it? Oh, but listen, to be driven crazy by that kind of moralistic scolding you'd have to be crazy already. All be had to do was ignore it!"

"Tir was crazy already. By our society's standards."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, I think Tir's a bom artist. Not a craftsman—a creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who's got to turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage."

"Was the play that good?" Takver asked naTvely, coming

out an inch or two from the blankets and studying Shevek's profile.

"No, I don't think so. It must have been funny on stage.

He was only twenty when he wrote it, after all. He keeps writing it over. He's never written anything else."

"He keeps writing the same play?"

"He keeps writing the same play."

"Ugh," Takver said with pity and disgust

"Every couple of decads he'd come and show it to me.

And I'd read it or make a show of reading it and try to talk with him about it He wanted desperately to talk about it, but he couldn't. He was too frightened."

"Of what? I don't understand."

"Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the human race, the brotherhood that rejected him. When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened."

"You mean, just because some people called his play im-

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moral and said he shouldn't get a teaching posting, he decided everybody was against him? That's a bit sillyl"

"But who was for him?"

"Dap was—all his friends."

"But he lost them. He got posted away."

^'Why didn't he refuse the posting, then?"

"Listen, Takver. I thought the aame thing, exactly. We always say that You said it—you should have refused to

Jo to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I'm a ree man, I didn't have to come here!... We always think it, and say it, but we don't do it We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, fike a room where we can come and say, 1 don't have to do anything, I make my own choices, I'm free.* And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay till we're reposted."

"Oh, Shev, that's not true. Onty since the drought Before that there wasn't half so much posting. People just worked up jobs where they wanted them, and joined a syndicate or formed one, and then registered with Div-lab. Divlab mostly posted people who preferred to be in General Labor Pool. It's going to go back to that again, now."

"I don't know. It ought to, of course. But even before the famine it wasnt going in that direction, but away from It Bedap was right: every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic

machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this ia the way it was done, this is the way it is done, this is the

way it has to be done.... There was a lot of that, before

the drought Five years of stringent control may have fixed the pattern permanently. Don't look so skepticall Listen, you tell me, how many people do you know who refused to accept a posting—even before the famine?"

Takver considered the question. "Leaving out nuchniU?**

"No, no. Nuchnibi are important."

"Well, several of Dap's friends—that nice composer,

Salas, and some of the scruffy ones too. And real nuctmibi used to come through Round Valley when I was a kid.

Only they cheated, I always thought They told such lovely lies and stories, and told fortunes, everybody was glad to see them and keep them and feed them as long as they'd {stay. But they never would stay long. But then people

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would Just pick up and leave town, kids usually, some of them just hated farm work. and they'd just quit their posting and leave. People do that everywhere, all the time. They move on, looking for something better. You just don't call it refusing postingi"

•*Why not?"

"What are you getting at?" Takver grumbled, retiring further under the blanket.

"Well, this. That we're ashamed to say we've refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don't believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he's a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminall We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. Tir never did that I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian—a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for •his first free act."

"I don't think," Takver said, muffled in the bed, and defensively, "that Tir was a very strong person."

*'No, he was extremely vulnerable."

There was a long silence.

"No wonder he haunts you," she said. "His play. Your book." "But rm luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere."

Takver watched him from the comer of her eye for

some time, then turned over and sat up, pulling the blanket

up around her shoulders. "Brr! It's cold. ... I was wrong.

wasn't I, about the book. About letting Sabiri cut it up and

put his name on it. It seemed right It seemed like setting

the work before the workman, pride before vanity, com-

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munity before ego, all that. But it wasn't really that at all, was it? It was a capitulation. A surrender to SabuTs authoritarianism."

"I don't know. It did get the thing printed."

'The right end, but the wrong meansi I thought about ft for a long time, at Rolny, Shev. Ill tell you what was wrong. I was pregnant. Pregnant women have no ethics.

Only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse. To hell with the book, and the partnership, and the truth, if they threaten the precious fetus! It's a racial preservation drive, but it can work right against community; it's biological, not social. A man can be grateful he never gets into the grip of it. But he'd better realize than a woman can, and watch out for it. I think that's why the old archisms used women as property. Why did the women let them? Because they were pregnant all the time—because they were already possessed, enslaved!"

"All right, maybe, but our society, here, is a true community wherever it truly embodies Odo's ideas. It was a woman who made the Promise! What are you doing— indulging guilt feelings? Wallowing?" The word he used was not "wallowing," there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally "coating continually and thickly with excrement." The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vndd metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.

"Well, no. It was lovely, having Sadiki But I was wrong about the book."

"We were both wrong. We always go wrong together.

You don't really think you made up my mind for me?"

"In that case I think I did."

"No. The fact is, neither of us made up our mind.

Neither of us chose. We let Sabul choose for us. Our own, internalized Sabul—convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being freel Well, never again. I learn slowly, but I learn."

"What are you going to do?" asked Takver, a thrill of agreeable excitement in her voice.

"Go to Abbenay with you and start a syndicate, a printing syndicate. Print the Principles, uncut And whatever else we like. Bedap's Sketch of Open Education in

Science, that the PDC wouldn't circulate. And Tirin's play.

I owe him that He taught me what prisons are, and who

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builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners.

Fin going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls."

"It may get pretty drafty," Takver said, huddled in blankets. She leaned against bim, and he put his arm around her shoulders. "I expect it will," he said.

Long after Takver had faDen asleep that night Shevek lay awake, his hands under his head, looking into darkness. hearing silence. He thought of his long trip out of the Dust, remembering the levels and mirages of the desert, the train driver with the bald, brown head and candid eyes, wto had said that one must work with time and not against it

Shevek had learned something about his own will these last four years. In its frustration he had learned its strength. No social or ethical imperative equaled it. Not even hunger could repress it The less he had, the more absolute became his need to be.

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function,** the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; ;ust the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.

All this Shevek had thought out, in these terms, for his conscience was a completely Odonian one.

He was therefore certain, by now, that his radical and unqualified wSl to create was, in Odonian terms, its own Justification- His sense of primary responsibility towards his work did not cut him off from his fellows, from his

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society, as he had thought It engaged him with them absolutely.

He also felt that a man who had this sense of responsibility about one thing was obliged to carry it through in all things. It was a mistake to see himself as its vehicle and nothing else, to sacrifice any other obligation to it

That sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she had spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.

So his mutual commitment with Takver, their relationship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four years' separation. They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had not occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment.

For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Takver's sleep, it was joy they were both after—the completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come borne.

Takver sighed softly in her sleep, as if agreeing with him, and turned over, .pursuing some quiet dream.

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity:

a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act Loyalty, which

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asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it

So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

269

Rodarred, the old capital of Avan Province, was a pointed city: a forest of pines, and above the spires of the pines, an airier forest of towers. The streets were dark and narrow, mossy, often misty, under the trees. Only from the seven bridges across the river could one look up and see the tops of the towers. Some of them were hundreds of feet tall, others were mere shoots, like ordinary houses gone to seed. Some were of stone, others of porcelain, mosaic, sheets of colored glass, sheathin&s of copper, tin, or gold. ornate beyond belief, delicate, glittering. In these hallucinatory and charming streets the Urrasti Council of World Governments had had its seat for the three hundred years of its existence. Many embassies and consulates to the CWG and to A-lo also clustered in Rodarred, only an hour's ride from Nio Esseia and the national seat of government.

The Terran Bmbassy to the CWG was housed in the River Castle, which crouched between the Nio highway and the river, sending up only one squat, grudging tower with a square roof and lateral window slits like narrowed eyes. Its walls had withstood weapons and weathers for fourteen hundred years. Dark trees clustered near its landward side, and between them a drawbridge lay across

270

a moat. The drawbridge was down, and its gates stood open. The moat, the river, the green grass, the black walls, the flag on top of the tower, all glimmered mistily as the sun broke through a river fog, and the bells in all the towers of Rodarred began their prolonged and insanely harmonious task of ringing seven o'clock.

A clerk at the very modem reception desk inside the castle was occupied with a tremendous yawn. *'We aren't really open till eight o'clock," he said hollowly.

*'I want to see the Ambassador/*

"The Ambassador is at breakfast YouTI have to make an appointment" In saying this the clerk wiped his watery eyes and was able to see the visitor clearly for the first time. He stared, moved his jaw several times, and said»

"Who are you? Where— What do you want?"

"You just hold on," the clerk said in the purest Nioti accent, still staring, and put out his hand to a telephone.

A car had Just drawn up between the drawbridge gate and the entrance of the Embassy, and several men were getting out of it, the metal fittings of their black coats glittering in the sunlight Two other men had just entered the lobby from the main part of the building, talking together, strange-looking people, strangely clothed. Shevek hurried around the reception desk towards them, trying to run. "Help me!" he said.

They looked up startled. One drew back, frowning. The other one looked past Shevek at the uniformed group who were just entering the Embassy. "Right in here," he said with coolness, took Shevek'a arm, and shut himself and Shevek into a little side office, with two steps and a gesture.

as neat as a ballet dancer. "What's up? You're from Nio Esseia?"

"I want to see the Ambassador.**

**Are you one of the strikers?"

"Shevek. My name is Shevek. From Anarres.'*

The alien eyes flashed, brilliant, intelligent, in the jet-black face. "Mai-god!" the Terran said under his breath. and then, in lotic, "Are you asking asylum?"

"I don't know. I—"

"Come with me. Dr. Shevek. IT1 get you somewhere you can sit down."

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There were halls, stairs, the black man's hand on his arm.

People were trying to take his coat off. He struggled against them, afraid they were after the notebook in his shirt pocket. Somebody spoke authoritatively in a foreign language. Somebody else said to him, "It's all right He's trying to find out if you're hurt. Your coat's bloody."

"Another man,'* Shevek said. "Another man's blood.**

He managed to sit up, though his head »wam. He was on a couch in a large, sunlit room; apparently he kad fainted. A couple of men and a woman stood near him. He looked at them without understanding.

"You are in the Embassy of Terra, Dr. Shevek. You are on Terran soil here. You are perfectly safe. You can stay here as long as you want"

The woman's skin was yellow-brown, Kke ferrous earth, and hairless, except on the scalp; not shaven, but hairless. The features were strange and childlike, small mouth, low-bridged nose, eyes with long full lids, cheeks and chin rounded, fat-padded. The whole figure was rounded, supple, childlike.

''You are safe here," she repeated.