The Dispossesed

He tried to speak, but could not. One of the men pushed him gently on the chest, saying, "Lie down, lie down."

He lay back. but he whispered. **I want to see the Ambassador."

"I'm the Ambassador. Keng is my name. We are glad you came to us. You are safe here. Please rest now. Dr. Shevek, and well talk later. There is no hurry." Her voice had an odd, singsong quality, but it was husky, like Tak-ver's voice.

*Takver,** he said, in his own language, "I don't know what to do."

She said, "Sleep," and he slept

After two days' sleep and two days' meals, dressed again in his grey loti suit, which they had cleaned and pressed for him, he was shown into the Ambassador's private salon on the third floor of the tower.

The Ambassador neither bowed to him nor shook his hand, but joined her hands palm to pahn before her breast and smiled. "I'm glad you feel better. Dr. Shevek.

No, I should say simply Shevek, shouldn't I? Please sit down.

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I*m sorry that I have to speak to you in lotic, a foreign language to both of vs. I dont know your language. I am told that it's a most interesting one, the only rationally invented language that has become the tongue of a great people."

He felt big, heavy, hairy, beside this suave alien. He sat down in one of the deep, soft chairs. Keng also sat down, but grimaced as she did so. "I have a bad back," she said, "from sitting in these comfortable chairs!" And Shevek realized then that she was not a woman of thirty or less, as he had thought, but was sixty or more; her smooth skin and childish physique had deceived him. "At home," she went on, "we mostly sit on cushions on the floor. But if I did that here I would have to look up even more at everyone. You Cetians are all so talll . . . We have a little problem. That is, we really do not, but the government of A-Io does. Your people on Anarres, the ones who maintain radio communication with Unas, you know, have been asking very urgently to speak with you. And the loti Government is embarrassed." She smiled, a smile of pure amusement. "They don't know what to say."

She was calm. She was calm as a waterworo stone

which, contemplated, calms. Shevek sat back in his chair

and took a very considerable time to answer.

"Does the loti Government know that I'm here?*'

"Well, not officially. We have said nothing, they have not asked. But we have several loti clerks and secretaries working here in the Embassy. So, of course, they know."

"Is it a danger to you—my being here?"

"Oh no. Our embassy is to the Council of World Governments, not to the nation of A-Io. You had a perfect right to come here, which the rest of the Council would force A-Io to admit. And as I told you, this castle is Terran soil." She smiled again; her smooth face folded into many little creases, and unfolded. "A delightful fantasy of diplomats! This castle eleven light-years from my Earth, this room in a tower in Rodarred, in A-Io, on the planet Unas of the sun Tau Ceti, is Terran soil."

"Then you can tell them I am here."

"Good. It will simplify matters. I wanted your consent." **There was no ... message for me, from Anarres?"

"I don't know. I didn't ask. I didn't think of it from your

point of view. If you are worried about something, we might broadcast to Anarres. We know the wave length

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your people there have been using, of course, but we haven't used it because we were not invited to. It seemed best not to press. But we can easily arrange a conversation for you."

"You have a transmitter?"

"We would relay through our ship—the Hainish ship that stays in orbit around Urraa. Hain and Terra work together, you know. The Hainish Ambassador knows you're with us; he is the only person who has been officially informed. So the radio is at your service."

He thanked her, with the simplicity of one who does not look behind the offer for the offer's motive. She studied him for a moment, her eyes shrewd, direct, and quiet. "I heard your speech," she said.

He looked at her as from a distance. "Speech?"

"When you spoke at the great demonstration in Capitol Square. A week ago today. We always listen to the clandestine radio, the Socialist Workers' and the Libertarians' broadcasts. Of course, they were reporting the demonstration. I heard you speak. I was very moved.

Then there was a noise, a strange noise, and one could hear the crowd beginning to shout. They did not explain. There was screaming. Then it died off the air suddenly. It was terrible, terrible to listen to. And you were there. How did you escape from that? How did you get out of the city? Old Town is still cordoned off; there are three regiments of the army in Nio; they round up strikers and suspects by the dozen and hundred every day. How did you get here?"

He smiled faintly. "In a taxi."

"Through all the checkpoints? And in that bloodstained coat? And everyone knows what you look like."

"I was under the back seat. The taxi was commandeered, is that the word? It was a risk some people took for me." He looked down at his hands, clasped on his lap.

He sat perfectly quietly and spoke quietly, but there was an inner tension, a strain, visible in his eyes and in the lines around his mouth. He thought a while, and went on in the same detached way, "It was luck, at first. When I came out of hiding, I was lucky not to be arrested at once. But I got into Old Town. After that it was not just luck. They thought for me where I might go, they planned

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tow to get me there, they toot the risks." He said a word in his own language, then translated it: "Solidarity, ... "

"It is very strange," aaid the Ambassador from Terra.

"I know almost nothing about your world, Shevek. I know only what the Urrasti tell us, since your people won't let us come there. I know, of course, that the planet is arid and bleak, and how the colony was founded, that it is an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism, that it has survived for a hundred and seventy years. I have read a little of Odo's writings—not very much. I thought that it was all rather unimportant to matters on Urras now, rather remote, an interesting experiment But I was wrong, wasn't I? It is important. Perhaps Anarres is the key to Urras. . . . The revolutionists in Nio, they come from that same tradition. They weren't just striking for better wages or protesting the draft. They are not only socialists, they are anarchists; they were striking against power. You see, the size of the demonstration, the intensity of popular feeling, and the government's panic reaction, all seemed very hard to understand. Why so much commotion? The government here is not despotic.

The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving. Why aren't they satisfied with bread and speeches? Why are they supersensitive? . . . Now I begin to see why. But what is still inexplicable is that the government of A-Io, knowing this libertarian tradition was still alive, and knowing the discontent in the industrial cities, still brought you here. Like bringing the match to the powder mill!"

"I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich.

Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it."

"Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?"

"With the annihilation of space."

She was silent a while. "Is that what you do?" she said in her mild, amused voice.

"No. It is not what I do! In the first place, I am not an

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inventor, an engineer. I am. a. theorist What they want from me is a theory. A theory of the General Field in temporal physics. Do you know what that is?"

"Shevek, your Cetian physics, your Noble Science, is completely beyond my grasp. I am not trained in mathematics, in physics, in philosophy, and it seems to consist of all of those, and cosmology, and more besides. But I know what you mean when you say the Theory of Simultaneity. in the way I know what is meant by the Theory of Relativity; that is, I know that relativity theory led to certain great practical results; and so I gather that your temporal physics may make new technologies possible."

He nodded. "What they want," he said, "is the instantaneous transferral of matter across space. Transflience. Space travel, you see, without traversal of space or laps6

of time. They may arrive at it yet; not from my equations,

I think. But they can make the ansible, with my equations, if they want it Men cannot leap the great gaps, but ideas can."

"What is an ansible, Shevek?'*

"An idea." He smiled without much humor. "It win be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Uke a kind of telephone."

Keng laughed. "The simplicity of physicists! So I could pick up the—ansible?—and talk with my son in Delhi?

And with my granddaughter, who was five when I left, and who lived eleven years while I was traveling from Terra to Unas in a nearly light-speed ship. And I could find out what's happening at home now, not eleven years ago. And decisions could be made, and agreements reached, and information shared. I could talk to diplomats on Chiffewar, you could talk to physicists on Hain, it wouldn't take ideas a generation to get from world to world. ... Do you know, Shevek, I think your very simple matter might change the lives of all the billions of people in the nine Known Worlds?"

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He nodded.

"It would make a league of worlds possible. A federation. We have been held apart by the years, the decades between leaving and arriving, between question and response. It's as if you had invented human speech! We can talk—at last we can talk together."

"And what wiD you say?"

His bitterness startled Keng. She looked at him and said nothing.

He leaned forward in his chair and nibbed his forehead painfully. "Look," he said, "I must explain to you why I have come to you, and why I came to this world also. I came for the idea. For the sake of the idea. To learn, to teach, to share in the idea. On Anarres, you see, we have cut ourselves off. We don't talk with other people, the rest of humanity. I could not finish my work there. And if I had been able to finish it, they did not want it, they saw no use in it So I came here. Here is what I need—die talk, the sharing, an experiment in the Light Laboratory that proves something it wasn't meant to prove, a book of Relativity Theory from an alien world, the stimulus I need. And so I finished the work, at last. It is not written out yet but I have the equations and the reasoning, it is done. But the ideas in my head aren't the only ones imr-portant to me. My society is also an idea. I was made by it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human tolidarity, an important idea. And though I was very stupid I saw at last that by pursuing the one, the physics, I am betraying the other. I am letting the propertarians buy the truth from me."

"What else could you do, Shevek?"

"Is there no alternative to selling? b there not such a thing as the gift?"

"Yes—"

"Do you not understand that I want to give this to you —and to Hain and the other worlds—and to the countries of Urraa? But to you all! So that one of you cannot use if as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit but only for the common good."

"In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only the common good," Keng said.

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"Tn the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the end. I have one lifetime, and I wiD not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master."

Kong's calmness was a much more forced, willed affair than it kad been at the beginning of their talk. The strength of Shevek's personality, unchecked by any self-consdousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable. She was shaken by him* and looked at him with compassion and a certain awe.

"What a it like,** she said, "what can it be like, the society that made you? I heard you speak of Anarres, in the Square, and I wept listening to you, but I didn't really believe you. Men always speak so of their homes, of the absent land. .. . But you are not like other men. There is a difference in you."

"The difference of the idea,1* he said. "It was for that Idea that I came here, too. For Anarres. Since my people refuse to look outward, I thought I might make others look at us. I thought it would be better not to hold apart behind a wall, but to be a society among the others, a world among the others, giving and taking. But there I was wrong—I was absolutely wrong."

"Why so? Surely—"

"Because there is nothing, nothing on Unas that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right We took nothing.

Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There a nothing you can do that profit does not enter Into, and fear of loss, and me wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior* to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them.

You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It Is a box—Unas is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; HeU is Urras."

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_*

For all his passion he spoke simply, with a kind of humility, and again the Ambassador from Terra watched him with a guarded yet sympathetic wonder, as if she had no idea how to take that simplicity.

"We are both aliens here, Shevek," she said at last. **I from much farther away in space and time. Yet I begin to

think that I am much less alien to Unas than you are....

Let me teQ you how this world seems to me. To me, and to an my fellow Terrans who have seen the planet, Unas:

is the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of an the inhabited worlds. It is the world that comes as dose as any could to Paradise.'*

She looked at him calmly and keenly; he said nothing.

"I know it's full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But it is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement. It Is what a world should bel It is alive, tremendously alive—alive, despite all its evils, with hope.

Is that not true?**

He nodded.

"Now, you man from a world I cannot even imagine, you who see my Paradise as HeU, will you ask what my world must be like?"

He was silent, watching her, his light eyes steady.

"My world, my Earth* is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human spedes. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there w&a nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Ter* rans made a desert... We survive there, as you do. People are toughl There are nearly a half billion of us now.

Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities! still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do—they never adapt either.

We failed as a species, as a social species. We are here now, dealing as equals with other human societies on other worlds, only because of the chanty of the Hainish. They

came; they brought us help. They built ships and gave them to us, so we could leave our ruined world. They treat us gently, charitably, as the strong man treats the

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sicfc one. They are a very strange people, the Hainish;

older than any of us; infinitely generous. They are altruists. They are moved by a guilt we don't even understand, despite an our crimes. They are moved in all they do, I think, by the past. their endleaa past Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each life toward the goal of racial survival. We had achieved that much, when the Hainish came. They brought us ... a little more hope. Not very much. We have outlived it. .*..

We can only look at this splendid world, this vital society, this Urras, this Paradise, from the outside. We are capable only of admiring it, and maybe envying it a little. Not very much."

"Then Anarres, as you heard me speak of it—what would Anarres mean to you, Keng?"

Nothing. Nothing, Shevek. We forfeited our chance

for Anarres centuries ago, before it ever came into being."

Shevek got up and went over to the window, one of the long horizontal window slits of the tower. There was a niche in the wall below it, into which an archer would step up to look down and aim at assailants at the gate; if one did not take that step up one could see nothing from it but the sunwashed, slightly misty sky. Shevek stood below the window gazing out, the light filling his eyes.

"You don't understand what time is," he said. '^Aou say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable present, the moment now. And you think that ia something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think ifs something you would like to have. But it is not real, you know. It is not stable, not solid—nothing is.

Things change, change. You cannot have anything. . . .

And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the pasti Because they are real: only their reality makes the present

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real. You wW not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres.

You are right, we are the key. But when you said that, you did not really believe it. You don't believe in Anarres. You dont believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment . . . My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you. You will not

let us. You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution. You would destroy us rather than admit our reality. rather than admit that there is hope! We cannot come to you. We can only wait for you to come to us."

Keng sat with a startled and thoughtful, and perhaps slightly dazed, expression.

**I don't understand—I don*t understand." she said at last "You are like somebody from our own past, the old idealists, the visionaries of freedom', and yet I don't understand you, as if you were trying to tell me of future things; and yet, as you say, you are here, nowl . . ." She had not lost her shrewdness. She said after a little while, 'Then why is it that you came to me, Shevek?"

"Oh, to give you the idea. My theory, you know. To save it from becoming a property of the loti, an investment or a weapon- If you are willing, the simplest thing to do would be to broadcast the equations, to give them to physicists all over this world, and to the Hainish and the other worlds, as soon as possible. Would you be willing to do that?"

"More than willing.'*

"It will come to only a few pages. The proofs and some of the implications would take longer, but that can come later, and other people can work on them if I cannot."

"But what will you do then? Do you mean to go back to Nio? The city is quiet now, apparently; the insurrection seems to be defeated, at least for the time being; but I'm afraid the loti government regards you as an insurrectionary. There is Thu, of course—"

"No. I don't want to stay here. I am no altruist! If you would help me in this too, I might go home. Perhaps the loti would be willing to send me home, even. It would be consistent, I think: to make me disappear, to deny my existence. Of course, they might find it easier to do by killing me or putting me in Jail for life. I don't want to die yet, and I don't want to die here in Hell at all. Where

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does your soul go, when you die in Hell?" He laughed; he had regained all his gentleness of manner. But if you could send me home, I think they would be relieved. Dead anarchists mate martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten."

"I thought I knew what 'realism* was," Keng said. She smiled, but U was not an easy smile.

"How can you, if you don't know what hope is?"

^ont judge us too hardly, Shevek."

"I dont judge you at all. I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return.'*

"Nothing? You call your theory nothing?"

"Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit," he said, turning to her, "and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.**

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Chapter 12

**! want to introduce a project," said Bedap, "from the Syndicate of Initiative. You know that we've been m radio contact with Unas for about twenty decads—"

"Against the recommendation of this council, and the Defense Federative, and a majority vote of the Usti"

"Yes," Bedap said, looking the speaker up and down, but not protesting the interruption. There were no rules of parliamentary procedure at meetings in PDC. Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements.

The process, compared to a well-managed executive con" ference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place—inside a living animaL

Bedap knew all his old opponents on the Import-Export Council; he had been coming and fighting them for three years now. This speaker was a new one, a young man, probably a new lottery posting to the PDC List Bedap looked him over benevolently and went on, "Let's not refight old quarrels, shall we? I propose a new one. We've received an interesting message from a group on Urras. It came on the wave length our loti contacts use, but it didn't come at a scheduled time, and was a weak signal,

It seems to have been sent from a country called Benbili,

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not from A-Io. The group called themselves The Odonian Society.' It appears that they're post-Settlement Odonians, existing in some fashion in the loopholes of law and government on Urras. Their message was to *the brothers on Anarres.* You can read it in the Syndicate bulletin, it's interesting. They ask if they might be allowed to send people here."

"Send people here? Let Urrasti come here? Spies?"

"No, as settlers.'*

*They want the Settlement reopened, is that it, Bedap?"

They »ay they're being hounded by their government, and are hoping for—"

"Reopen the Settlement! To any profiteer who calk himself an Odonian?"

To report an Anarresti managerial debate in fim would be difficult; it went very fast, several people often speaking at once, nobody speaking at great length, a good deal of sarcasm, a great deal left unsaid; the tone emotional, often fiercely personal; an end was reached, yet there was no conclusion. It was like an argument among brothers, or

among thoughts m an undecided mind.

"If we let these so-called Odonians come, how do they propose to get here?"

There spoke the opponent Bedap dreaded, the cool, intelligent woman named Rulag. She had been his cleverest enemy all year in the council- He glanced at Shevek, who was attending this council for the first time, to draw his attention to her. Somebody had told Bedap that Rmag was an engineer, and he had found in her the engineer's clarity and pragmatism of mind, plus the mechanist's hatred of complexity and irregularity. She opposed we Syndicate of Initiative on every issue, including that of its right to exist Her agnunents were good, and Bedap respected her.

Sometimes when she spoke of the strength of Urras, and the danger of bargaining with the strong from a position of weakness, he believed her.

For there were times when Bedap wondered, privately, whether he sad Shevek, when they got together in the winter of '68 and discussed the means by which a frustrated physicist might print bis work and communicate it to physicists on Unas, had not set off an uncontrollable chain of events. When they had finally set up radio contact, the Urrasti had been more eager to talk, to exchange

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information, than they had expected; and when they had printed reports of those exchanges, the opposition on Anarres had been more virulent than they had expected.

People on both worlds were paying more attention to them than was really comfortable. When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you. and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.

"I suppose they'd come on one of the freighters," he replied. "Like good Odonians, they'd hitchhike. If their government, or the Council of World Governments, let them. Would they let them? Would the archists do the anarchists a favor? That's what I'd like to find out. If we invited a small group, six or eight, of these people, what would happen at that end?"

"Laudable curiosity," Rulag said. "We'd know the danger better, all right, if we knew better how things really work on Unas. But the danger lies m the act of finding out." She stood up, signifying that she wanted to hold the floor for more than a sentence or two. Bedap winced, and glanced again at Shevek, who sat beside him. "Look out for this one," he muttered. Shevek made no response, but he was usually reserved and shy at meetings, no good at all unless he got moved deeply by something, in which case he was a surprisingly good speaker. He sat looking down at his hands. But as Rulag spoke, Bedap noticed that though she was addressing him* she kept glancing at Shevek.

"Your Syndicate of Initiative," she said, emphasizing the pronoun, "has proceeded with building a transmitter. with broadcasting to Urras and receiving from them, and with publishing the communications. You've done all this against the advice of the majority of the PDC, and increasing protests from the entire Brotherhood. There have been no reprisals against your equipment or yourselves yet, largely, I believe, because we Odonians have become unused to the very idea of anyone's adopting a course harmful to others and persisting in it against advice and protest. It's a rare event In fact, you are the first of us who have behaved in the way that archist critics always predicted people would behave in a society without laws: with total irresponsibility towards the society's welfare. I don't propose to go again into the harm you've al-

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ready done, and handing out of scientific information to a powerful enemy, the confession of our weakness that each of your broadcasts to Urraa represents. But now, thinking that we've got used to all that, you're proposing something very much worse. What's the difference, youTI say, between talking to a few Urrasti on the shortwave and talking to a few of them here in Abbenay? What's the difference? What's the difference between a shut door and an open one? Let's open the door—that's what he's saying, you know, ammari. Let's open the door, let the Urrasti cornel Six or eight pseudo-Odonians on the next freighter. Sixty or eighty loti profiteers on the one after, to look us over and see how we can be divided up as a property among the nations of Unas. And the next trip will be six or eight hundred armed ships of war: guns, soldiers, ^Aan occupying force. The end of Anarres, the end of the Promise. Our hope lies, it has lain for a hundred and seventy years, in the Terms of the Settlement: No Urrasti off the ships, except the Settlers, then, or ever. No mixing. No contact To abandon that principle now is to say to the tyrants whom we defeated once. The experiment has failed, come re-enslave usi"

"Not at an,'* Bedap said promptly. "The message is dear: The experiment has succeeded, we're strong enough now to face you as equals."

The argument proceeded as before, a rapid hammering of issues. It did not last long. No vote was taken, as usual. Almost everyone present was strongly for sticking to the Terms of the Settlement, and as soon as this became clear Bedap said, "All right. 111 take that as settled. Nobody comes in on the Kuieo Fart or the Mindful. In the matter of bringing Urrasti to Anarres, the Syndicate's aims clearly must yield to the opinion of the society as a whole; we asked your advice, and well follow it. But there's another aspect of the same question. Shevek?"

"Weu, there's the question," Shevek said, "Of sending an Anarresti to Unas."

There were exclamations and queries. Shevek did not raise his voice, which was not far above a mumble, but persisted, "It wouldn't harm or threaten anyone living on Anarres. And it appears that it's a matter of the individual's right; a kind of test of it, in fact. The Terms of the Settlement don't forbid ft. To forbid it now would be an

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assumption of authority by the PDC, an abridgment of the right of the Odonian individual to initiate action harmless to others."

Rulag sat forward. She was smiling a little. "Anyone can leave Anarres,'* she said. Her light eyes glanced from Shevek to Bedap and back. "He can go whenever he likes. if the propertarians' freighters win take him. He cast come back."

"Who says he cant?" Bedap demanded.

"The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement. Nobody will be allowed off the freight ships farther than the boundary of the Port of Anarres.**

"Well, now. that was surely meant to apply to Urrastf. not Anarresti," said an old adviser, Ferdaz, who liked to stick his oar in even when it steered the boat off the course he wanted.

"A person coming from Urras is an Urrasti," said Rulag.

"Legalisms, legalismsl What's all this quibbling?" said a calm, heavy woman named TrepiL

"Quibbling! ** cried the new member, the young man.

He had a Northrising accent and a deep, strong voice. "If you don't like quibbling, try this. If there are people here that dont like Anarres, let *em go. 1*11 help. m carry *em to the Port, I'll even kick *em there! But if they try to come sneaking back, there's going to be some of us there to meet them. Some real Odoniana. And they wont find us smiling and saying, "Welcome home, brothers.'

They'll find their teeth knocked down their throats and their balls kicked up into their bellies. Do you understand that? Is it clear enough for you?"

"Clear, no; plain, yes. Plain ax a fart." said Bedap. '"Clarity is a function of thought. You should leam some Odoniamsm before you speak here."

"You're not worthy to say the name of Odo!" the

young man shouted. 'Tfou're traitors, you and the whole

Syndicate! There are people all over Anarres watching

you. You think we dont know that Shevek*s been asked to

go to Urras, to go seU Anarresti science to the profiteers?

You think we don't know that all you snivelers would

love to go there and live rich and let the propertarians pat

you on the back? You can got Good riddance! But if you

try coming back here, you'U meet with Justicel"

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He was on his feet and leaning across the table, shouting straight into Bedap's face. Bedap looked up at him 'and said, ''You dont mean justice, you mean punishment.

Do you think they're the same thing?"

"He means violence," Rulag said. "And if there is violence, you will have caused it. You and your Syndicate. And you will have deserved it."

A thin, small, middle-aged man beside Trepu began speaking, at first so softly, in a voice hoarsened by the dust cough, that few of them heard him. He was a visiting delegate from a Southwest miners¹ syndicate, not expected to speak on this matter. ². . . what men deserve," he was Saying. "For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings,

•and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved?

Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think." They were, of course, Odo's words from the Prison Letters, but spoken in the weak, hoarse voice they made a strange effect, as if the man were working them out word by word himself, as if they came from his own heart, slowly, with difficulty, as the water wells up slowly, slowly, from the desert sand.

Rulag listened, her head erect, her face set, like that of a person repressing pain. Across the table from her Shevek sat with his head bowed. The words left a silence after them, and he looked up and spoke into it.

**You see," he said, *'what we're after is to remind ourselves that we didn't come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we're no better than a machine. If an individual can't work in solidarity with his fellows, it's his duty to work alone.

His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We've been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of (a State founded upon law, but members of a society

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founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our

hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual

spirit, or it is nowhere. It is for all, or it is nothing. If it is

seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.' We cant

stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.'*

Rulag replied, as quietly as he, but very coldly, "you have no right to involve us all in a risk that private motives compel you to take.**

"No one who will not go as far as I'm willing to go has any right to stop me from going," Shevek answered. Their eyes met for a second; both looked down.

They assented, and he and Shevek left the meeting.

"I've got to go over to the Institute," Saevek said as they came out of the PDC building. "Sabul sent me one of his toenail dippings—first in years. What's on his mind, I wonder?"

"What's on that woman Rulag's mind, I wonderi She's got a personal grudge against you. Envy, I suppose. We won't put you two across a table again, or well get nowhere. Though that young fellow from Northrising was bad news, too. Majority rule and might makes right! Are we going to get our message across, Shev? Or are we only hardening the opposition to it?"

"We may really have to send somebody off to Urras— prove our right to by acts, if words won't do it."

"Maybe. So long as it isn't mel I'll talk myself purple about our right to leave Anarres, but if I had to do it, by damn, I'd slit my throat"

Shevek laughed. "I've got to go. TO. be home in an hour or so. Come eat with us tonight"

"ITI meet you at the room.**

Shevek set off down the street with his long stride;

Bedap stood hesitating in front of the PDC building. It was midaftemoon, a windy, sunny, cold spring day. The streets of Abbenay were bright, scoured-looking, alive with light and people. Bedap felt both excited and let

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down. Everything, including Ms emotions, was promising yet unsatisfactory. He went off to the domicile in the Pekesh Block where Shevek and Takver now lived, and found, as he had hoped, Takver at home with the baby.

Takver had miscarried twice and then Pilua bad come along, late and a little unexpected, but very welcome. She had been small at birth and now, getting on to two, was still small, with thin arms and legs. When Bedap held her he was always vaguely frightened of or repelled by the feeling of those arms, so fragile that he could have broken them simply with a twist of his hand. He was very fond of Pilun, fascinated by her cloudy grey eyes and won by her utter trustfulness, but whenever he touched her he knew consciously, as he had not done before, what the attraction of cruelty is. why the strong torment the weak. Aod therefore—though he could not have said why "therefore"

—he also understood something that had never made muck sense to him, or interested him at all: parental feeling. It gave him a most extraordinary pleasure when Pflun called him •tadde."

He sat down on the bed platform under the window. It was a good-sized room with two platforms. The floor was matted; there was no other furniture, no chairs or tables, only a little movable fence that marked off a play space or screened Pilun's bed. Takver had the long, wide drawer of the other platform open. sorting piles of papers kept in ft. *T)o hold Pilun, dear Dapl" she said with her large Bmfle, when the baby began working towards him. **She'8 been into these papers at least ten times, every time I get them sorted. Ill be done in just a minute here—ten minutes."

•'Don't hurry. I dont want to talk. I just want to sit here. Come on, Pilun. Walk—there's a girl! Walk to Tadde Dap. Now I've got youl"

Puun sat contentedly on his knees and studied his hand,

Bedap was ashamed of his nails, which he no longer bit but which remained deformed from biting, and at first h& closed his hand to hide them; then he was ashamed of shame, and opened up his hand. Pilun patted it

*Thu is a nice room." he said. "With the north light.

11*8 always calm in here."

"Yes. Shh, I'm counting these."

After a while she put the piles of paper away and shut

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the drawer. "Therel Sorry. I told Shev I'd page that article for him. How about a drink?"

Rationing was still in force on many staple foods, though much less strict than it had been five years before. The fruit orchards of Northrising bad suffered less and recovered quicker from the drought than the grain-growing regions, and last year dried fruits and fruit juices had gone off the restricted list Takver had a bottle standing in the shaded window. She poured them each a cupful, in rather lumpy earthenware cups which Sadik had made at school. She sat down opposite Bedap and looked at him, smiling. "Well. how's it going at PDC?"

"Same as ever. How's the fish lab?"

Takver looked down into her cup, moving it to catch

the light on the surface of the liquid. **I don't know. I'm

thinking of quitting."

"Why, Takver?"

"Rather quit than be told to. The trouble is, I like that? Job, and I'm good at it. And it's the only one like it in Abbenay. But you can't be a member of a research team that's decided you're not a member of it."

"They're coming down harder on you, are they?"

"All the time," she said, and looked rapidly and unconsciously at the door, as if to be sure that Shevek wa^A not there, hearing. "Some of them are unbelievable. Well, you know. There's no use going on about it."

"No, that's why I'm glad to catch you alone. I dont really know. I, and Shev, and Skovan, and Gezach, and the rest of us who spend most of the time at the printing;

shop or the radio tower, don't have postings, and so we

don't see much of people outside the Syndicate of Initiative. I'm at PDC a lot, but that's a special situation, I expect opposition there because I create it What is it mat you run up against?"

"Hatred," Takver said, in her dark, soft voice. 'Tteal hatred. The director of my project won't speak to me any more. Well, that's not much loss. He's a stick anyhow.,

But some of the others do tell me what they think. . . . There's a woman, not at the fish labs, here in the dom. I'm on the block sanitation committee and I had to go speak to her about something. She wouldn't let me talk. *Doa'f you try to come into this room, I know you, you damned traitors, you intellectuals, you egoizers' and so on and so

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on, and then slammed the door. It was grotesque." Takver laughed without humor. Pilun, seeing her laugh, smiled as she sat curled in the angle of Bedap's arm, and then yawned. "But you know, it was frightening. I'm a coward,

Dap. I don't like violence. I don't even like disapproval!"

"Of course not. The only security we have is our neighbors* approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can't 'break' a custom; it's the framework of your life with other people. We're only just beginning to feel what it's like to be revolutionaries, as Shev put it in the meeting today. And it isnt comfortable."

"Some people understand," Takver said with determined optimism. "A woman on the omnibus yesterday, I don't know where I'd met her, tenth-day work some time, I suppose; she said, *It must be wonderful to live with a great scientist, it must be so interestingi' And I said, *Yea» at least there's always something to talk about*.. . . Pilun, don't go to sleep, babyl Shevek will be home soon and well go to commons. Jiggle her. Dap. Well, anyway, you gee, she knew who Sbev was, but she wasn't hateful or disapproving, she was very nice."

"People do know who he is," Bedap said. "It's funny, because they cant understand his books any more than I can. A few hundred do, he thinks. Those students in the Divisional Institutes who try to organize Simultaneity courses. I think a few dozen would be a liberal estimate, myself. And yet people know of him, they have tlys feeling he's something to be proud of. That's one thing the Syndicate has done, I suppose, if nothing else. Printed Shev's books. It may be the only wise thing we've done."

"Oh, now! You must have had a bad session at PDO today."

"We did. I'd like to cheer you up. Takver. but I can't The Syndicate is cutting awfully close to the basic societal bond, the fear of the stranger. There was a young fellow there today openly threatening violent reprisal. Well, it's a poor option, but he*U find others ready to take it. And that Rulag, by damn, she's a formidable opponenti"

"You know who she is. Dap?'*

"Who she is?"

"Shev never told you? Well, he doesnt talk about her.

She's the mother."

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-Shev's mother?"

Takver nodded. "She left when he was two. The father stayed with him. Nothing unusual, of course. Except Shev's feelings. He feels that he lost something essential—he and the father both. He doesn't make a general principle out of it, that parents should always keep the children, or anything. But the importance loyalty has for him, it goes back to that, I flunk.**

"What's unusual," said Bedap energetically, oblivious of Pilun, who had gone sound asleep on his lap, "distinctly unusual, is her feelings about himi She's been waiting for him to come to an Import-Export meeting, you could tell, today. She knows he's the soul of the group, and she hates us because of him. Why? Guilt? Has the Odonian Society gone so rotten we're motivated by guilt? . . . You know, now that I know it, they look alike. Only in her, it's all gone hard, rock-hard—dead.'*

The door opened as he was speaking. Shevek and Sadik came in. Sadik was ten years old, tall for her age and thin. all long legs, supple and fragile, with a cloud of dark hair. Behind her came Shevek; and Bedap, looking at him in the curious new light of his kinship with Rulag, saw him as one occasionally sees a very old friend, with a vividness to which all the past contributes: the splendid reticent face, ful* of life but worn down, worn to the bone. It was an intensely individual face, and yet the features were not only like Rulag's but like many others among the Anar-resti, a people selected by a vision of freedom, and adapted to a barren world, a world of distances, silences, desolations.

In the room, meantime, much closeness, commotion, communion: greetings, laughter, Pilun being passed around, rather crossly on her part, to be hugged, the bottle being passed around to be poured, questions, conversations. Sadik was the center first, because she was the least often there of the family; then Shevek. "What did old Greasy Beard want?"

"Were you at the Institute?" Takver asked, examining him as he sat beside her.

"Just went by there. Sabul left me a note this morning at the Syndicate." Shevek drank off his fruit mice and lowered the cup, revealing a curious set to his mouth, a

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nonexpression. "He said the Physics Federation has a fulltime posting to fill. Autonomous, permanent."

"For you, you mean? There? At the Institute?"

He nodded,

"Sabul told you?**

*'He's trying to enlist you," Bedap said.

"Yes, I think so. H you cant uproot it, domesticate it, as we used to say in Northsetting." Shevek suddenly and spontaneously laughed. "It is funny, isn*t it?** he said.

'•No," said Takver. "It isn*t funny. It's disgusting. How could you go talk to him, even? After all the slander he*a spread about you, and the lies about the Principles being stolen from him, and not telling you that the Urrasd gave you that prize, and then Just last year, when he got those kids who organized the lecture series broken up and seat away because of your *crypto-authoritarian influence* over them—you an authoritarian!—that was sickening, unforgivable. How can you be civil to a man like that?"

"Well, it isnt all Sabul, you know. He's just a spokesman."

"I know, but he loves to be the spokesman. And he's been so squalid for so long! Well, what did you say to him?"

"I temporized—as you might say," Shevek said, and laughed again. Takver glanced at him again, knowing now that he was, for all his control, in a state of extreme tension or excitement.

"You didn't turn him down flat, then?"

"I said that I'd resolved some years ago to accept no regular work postings, so long as I was able to do theoretical work. So he said that since it was an autonomous post Fd be completely free to go on with the research Fd been doing, and the purpose of giving me the post was to —let's see how he put it—to facilitate access to experimental equipment at the Institute, and to the regular channels of publication and dissemination.' The PDC press, in other words."

**Why, then you've won," Takver said, looking at him with a queer expression. "You've won. They'll print what you write. It's what you wanted when we came back here five years ago. The walls are down,"

"There are walls behind the walls," Bedap said.

"I've won only if I accept the posting. Sabul is offering

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to ... legalize me. To make roe official. In order to dissociate me from the Syndicate of Initiative. Don't you see that as his motive. Dap?"

"Of course," Bedap said. His face was somber. "Divide to weaken."

"But to take Shev back into the Institute, and print what he writes on the PDC press, is to give implied approval to the whole Syndicate, isn't it?"

"It ought mean that to most people," Shevek said.

**No, it won't," Bedap said. "Itll be explained. The great physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while. Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicked deviationists. But the good Odonians at the Institute gently showed him his errors and he has returned to the path of social-organic truth.

Leaving the Syndicate of Initiative shorn of its one conceivable claim to the attention of anybody on Anarres or Urras"

"I'm not leaving the Syndicate, Bedap."

Bedap lifted his head, and said after a minute, "No. I know you're not."

"All right Let's go to dinner. This belly growls: listen to it. Pilun, hear it? Rrowr, rrowrl"

"Hup!" Pilun said in a tone of command. Shevek picked her up and stood up, swinging her onto his shoulder. Behind his head and the child's, the single mobile hanging in this room oscillated slightly. It was a large piece made of wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disappeared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the two thin, clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval wires in complexly interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the common center, never quite meeting, never entirely parting. Takver called it the Inhabition of Time.

They went to the Pekesh commons, and waited till the registry board showed a sign-out, so they could bring Bedap in as a guest. His registering there signed him out at the commons where he usually ate, as the system was coordinated citywide by a computer. It was one of the highly mechanized "homeostatic processes" beloved by the eariy Settlers, which persisted only in Abbenay. Like the less

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elaborate arrangements used elsewhere, it never quite worked out; there were shortages, surpluses, and frustrations, but not major ones. Sign-outs at Pekesh commons were infrequent, as the kitchen was the best known in Abbenay. having a tradition of great cooks. An opening appeared at last, and they went in. Two young people whom Bedap knew slightly as dom neighbors of Shevek*s and Takver's joined them at table. Otherwise they were let alone—left alone. Which? It did not seem to matter.

They had a good dinner, a good time talking. But every BOW and then Bedap felt that around them there was a circle of silence.

"I don't know what the Urrasti will think up next," he said, and though he was speaking lightly he found himself, to his annoyance, lowering his voice. "They've asked to come here, and asked Shev to come there; what will the next move be?"

"I didn't know they'd actually asked Shev to go there,"

Takver said with a half frown.

"Yes, you did." Shevek said. "When they told me that they'd given me the prize, you know, the Seo Oen, they asked if I couldnt come, remember? To get the money that goes with ill" Shevek smiled, luminous. If there was a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he had alway been alone.

Thafs right. I did know that. It just didn't register as an actual possibility. You'd been talking for decads about suggesting in PDC that somebody might go to Urras, just to shock them."

That's what we finally did, this afternoon. Dap made me say it."

"Were they shocked?"

"Hair on end, eyes bulging—**

Takver giggled. Pilun sat in a high chair next to Shevek, exerdsinf her teeth on a piece of holum bread and her voice in song. "0 mathery bathery," she proclaimed, "ab-bery abbery babber dabi** Shevek, versatile, replied in the same vein. Adult conversation proceeded without intensity and with interruptions. Bedap did not mind, he had learned lonf ago that you took Shevek with complications or not at alL The most silent one of them all was Sadik.

Bedap stayed on with them for an hour after dinner in the pleasant, spacious common rooms of the domicile, and

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when he got up to go offered to accompany Sadik to her school dormitory, which was on his way. At this something happened, one of those events or signals obscure to those outside a family; all he knew was that Shevek, with no fuss or discussion, was coming along. Takver had to go feed Pflun, who was getting louder and louder. She kissed Bedap, and he and Shevek set off with Sadik, talking. They talked hard, and walked right past the learning center.

They turned back. Sadik had stopped before the dormitory entrance. She stood motionless, erect and slight, her face still, in the weak light of the street lamp. Shevek stood equally still for a moment, then went to her. "What is wrong, Sadik?"

The child said, "Shevek, may I stay in the room tonight?"

"Of course. But whafs wrong?"

Sadik'a delicate, long face quivered and seemed to fragment. "They dont like me, in the dormitory," she said, her voice becominf shrill with tension, but even softer than before.

They don't like you? What do you mean?"

They did not touch each other yet. She answered him with desperate courage. "Because they dont like—they don't like the Syndicate, and Bedap, and—and you. They call— The big sister in the dorm room, she said you—we were all tr— She said we were traitors," and saying the word the child jerked as if she had been shot, and Shevek caught her and held her. She held to him with all her strength, 'weeping in great gasping soba. She was too old, too tall for him to pick up. He stood holding her, stroking her hair. He looked over her dark head at Bedap. His own eye* were full of tears. He said, "It's all right. Dap. Goon."

There was nothing for Bedap to do but leave them there, the man and the child, in that one intimacy which he could not share, the hardest and deepest, the intimacy of pain. It gave him no sense of relief or escape to go;

rather he felt useless, diminished. "I am thirty-nine years old," he thought as he walked on towards his domicile, the five-man room where he lived in perfect independence.

"Forty in a few decada. What have I done? What have I been doing? Nothing. Meddling. Meddling in other people's lives because I don't have one. I never took the time.

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And the time's going to run out on me, all at once, and I will never have had . . . that." He looked back, down the long, quiet street, where the comer lamps made soft pools of light in the windy darkness, but he had gone too far to see the father and daughter, or they had gone. And what he meant by "that" he could not have said, good as he was with words; yet he felt that he understood it clearly. that all his hope was in that understanding, and that if he would be saved he must change his life.

When Sadik was calm enough to let go of him, Shevek left her litting on the front step of the dormitory, and went in to tell the vigilkeeper that she would be staying with the parents this night. The vigilkeeper spoke coldly to him. Adults who worked in children's dormitories had a natural tendency to disapprove of overnight dom visits, finding them disruptive; Shevek told himself he was probably mistaken in feeling anything more than such disapproval in the vigilkeeper. The halls of the learning center were brightly lit, ringing with noise, music practice, children's voices. There were all the old sounds, the smells, the shadows, the echoes of childhood which Shevek remembered, and with them the fears. One forgets the fears.

He came out and walked home with Sadik, his arm around her thin shoulders. She was silent, still struggling. She said abruptly as they came to their entry in the Pekesh main domicile, "I .know it isn't agreeable for you and Takver to have me overnight."

"Where did you get that idea?"

"Because you want privacy, adult couples need privacy." There's Pilun," he observed.

"Pilun doesn't count"

Neither do you."

She sniffled, attempting to smile.

When they came into the light of the room, however, her white, red-patched, puffy face at once startled Takver into saying, "Whatever is wrong?"—and Pilun, interrupted in sucking, startled out of bliss, began to howl, at which Sadik broke down again, and for a while it appeared that everyone was crying, and comforting each other, and refusing comfort. This sorted out quite suddenly into silence, Pilun on the mother's lap, Sadik on the father's.

When the baby was replete and put down to sleep,

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Takver said in a low but impassioned voice, "Nowl What is it?"

Sadik had gone half to sleep herself, her head on Shevek's chest. He could feel her gather herself to answer.

He stroked her hair to keep her quiet, and answered for her. "Some people at the learning center disapprove of us.**

"And by damn what damned right have they to disapprove of us?"

"Shh, shh. Of the Syndicate."

"Oh,'* Takver said, a queer guttural noise, and ia buttoning up her tunic she tore the button right off the fabric. She stood looking down at it on her palm. Then she looked at Shevek and Sadik.

"How long has this been going on?"

"A long time," Sadik said, not lilting her head.

''Days, decads, all quarter?"

"Oh, longer. But they get ... they're meaner in the dorm now. At night Terzol doesnt stop them." Sadik spoke rather like a sleep-talker, and quite serenely, as if the matter no longer concerned her.

"What do they do?" Takver asked, though Shevek's gaze warned her.

"Well, they ... they're just mean. They keep me out of the games and things. Tip, you know, she was a friend, she used to come and talk at least after lights out. But she stopped. Terzol is the big sister in the dorm now, and she's ... she says, 'Shevek is—Shevek—* **

He broke in, feeling the tension rise in the child's body, the cowering and the summoning of courage, unendurable.

"She says, 'Shevek is a traitor, Sadik ia an egoizef—You know what she says, TakverI" His eyes were blazing. Takver came forward and touched her daughter's cheek, once, rather timidly. She said in a quiet voice, "Yes, I know," and went and sat down on the other bed platform, facing

them.

The baby, tucked away next to the wan, snored slightly.

People in the next room came back from commons, a door slammed, somebody down in the square called good night and was answered from an open window. The big domicile, two hundred rooms, was astir, alive quietly all round them; as their existence entered into its existence so did its existence enter into theirs, as part of a whole. Presently Sadik slipped off her father's knees and sat on the plat-

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form beside him, close to him. Her dark hair waa rumpled and tangled, hanging around her face.

"I didn't want to tell you, because . . .** Her voice sounded thin and small. "But it hist keeps getting worse.

They make each other meaner."*

"Then you won't go back there," Shevek said. He put his arm around her, but she resisted, sitting straight.

"If I go and talk to them—" said Takver.

"It's no use. They feel as they feel."

**But what is this we're up against?*' Takver asked with bewilderment.

Shevek did not answer. He kept his arm around Sadik, and she yielded at last, leaning her head against his arm with a weary heaviness. "There are other learning centers,'* he said at last, without much certainty. ,

Takver stood up. She clearly could not sit still and wanted to do something, to act. But there was not much to do. "Let me braid your hair, Sadik," she said in a subdued voice.

She brushed and braided the child's hair; they set the screen across the room, and tucked Sadik in beside the sleeping baby. Sadik was near tears again saying good night, but within half an hour they heard by her breathing that she was asleep.

Shevek had settled down at the head of their bed platform with a notebook and the slate he used for calculating.

'T paged that manuscript today,*' Takver said.

*'What did it come to?"

**Forty-one pages. With the supplement.**

He nodded. Takver got up, looked over the screen at the two sleeping children, returned, and sat down on the edge of the platform.

<

"I don't know. If she spends much time with us, probably not."

"You certainly arent suggesting—**

"No, I'm not I'm stating a fact, only. If we choose to

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give the chad the intensity of Individual love, we cant Spare her what comes with that, the risk of pain. Pain from us, and through u»."

"It isn't fair she should be tormented for what we do.

She's so good, and good-natured, she's like dear water—" Takver stopped, strangled by a brief rush of tears, wiped her eyes, set her lips.

**It i&n't what we do. It's what I do.** He put his notebook down. **You*ve been suffering for it too.**

*^I dont care what they flunk."

"At work?-

1 can take another posting.**

**Not here, not in your own field.'1

*^Well, do you want me to go somewhere else? The Sor-ruba fishery labs at Peace-and-Plenty would take me on.

But where does that leave you?" She looked at him angrily. "Here, I suppose?"

"I could come with TOO. Skovan and the others are coming along in lotic, theyTl be able to handle the radio, and that's my main practical function in the Syndicate now. I can do physics as wen in Peace-and-Plenty as I can here. But unless I drop right out of the Syndicate of Initiative, that doesn't solve the problem, does it? I'm the problem. I'm the one who makes trouble."

**Would they care about that, in a little place like Peaco-and-Plenty?"

*Tm afraid they might"

**Shev. how much of his hatred have you run up against? Have you been keeping quiet, like Sadik?"

"And like you. Well, at times. When I went to Concord. last summer, it was a little worse than I told you. Rock-throwing, and a good-sized fight The students who asked me to come had to fifiht for me. They did. too, but I got out quick; I was putting them in danger. Well, students want some danger. And after all we've asked for a fight, we've deliberately roused people. And there are plenty on our side. But now... but Fm beginning to wonder if Fm not imperiling you and the children. Tak. By staying with you."

"Of course you're not in danger yourself," she said savagely.

"I've asked for it. But it didn't occur to me they'd ex-

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tend their tribal resentment to you. I dont feel the same about your danger as I do about mine."

"Altruist!"

"Maybe. I cant help ft. I do feel responsible, Tak.

Without me, you could go anywhere, or stay here. You've worked for the Syndicate, but what they hold against you is your loyalty to me. I'm the symbol. So there doesn't... there isn't anywhere for me to go.**

"Go to Urras,'* Takver said. Her voice was so harsh that Shevek sat back as if she had hit him in the face.

She did not meet his eyes, but she repeated* more softly, "Go to Urras. . . . Why not? They want you there.

They don't here! Maybe they*!! begin to see what they've lost, when you're gone. And you want to go. I saw that tonight I never thought of it before, but when we talked about the prize, at dinner, I saw it, the way you laughed.**

*! don't need prizes and rewards!"

"No, but you do need appreciation, and discussion, and students—with no Salmi-strings attached. And look. You and Dap keep talking about scaring PDC with the idea of somebody going to Urras, asserting his right to self-determination. But if you talk about it and nobody goes, you've only strengthened their side—you've only proved that custom is unbreakable. Now you've brought it up in a PDC meeting, somebody win have to go. It ought to be you. They've asked you; you have a reason to go. Go get your reward—the money they're saving for you," she ended with a sudden quite genuine laugh.

Takver, I dont want to go to Urrasi"

"Yes you do; you know you do. Though I'm not sure I know why.**

"Weu. of course Fd like to meet some of the physicists.

• . • And see the laboratories at leu Bun where they've been experimenting with light" He looked shamefaced as he said it.

"It's your right to do so." Takver said with fierce determination. "H It's part of your work, you ought to do ft."

"It would help keep the Revolution alive—on both sides "-wouldnt ft?" he said. **What a crazy idea! Uke Tina's play. only backwards. I'm to go subvert the archists. . ., Well, it would at least prove to them that Anarres exists.

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They taDe with us on the radio, but I dont think they really believe in us. In what we are."

*'H they did, they might be scared. They might come

and blow us right out of the sky, if you really convinced

them."

"I dont think so. I might make a little revolution in their physics again, but not in their opinions. It's here. here, that I can affect society, even though here they wont pay attention to my physics. You're quite right; now that we've talked about it, we must do it" There was a pause.

He said. "I wonder what kind of physics the other races

do."

"What other races?"

*The aliens. People from Hain and other solar systems.

There are two alien Embassies on Urras, Hain and Terra.

The Hahnsh invented the interstellar drive Urras uses now.

I suppose they'd give it to us. too, if we were willing to ask for it It would be interesting to ..." He did not finish.

After another long pause he turned to her and said in a changed, sarcastic tone, "And what would you do while I went visiting the propertarians?"

"Go to the Sorruba coast with the girls, and live a very peaceful life as a fish-lab technician. Until you come back."

"Come back? Who knows if I could come back?**

She met his gaze straight on. "What would prevent you?"

"Maybe the UrrastL They might keep me. No one there is free to come and go, you know. Maybe our own people. They might prevent me from landing. Some of them in PDC threatened that, today. Rulag was one of them."

"She would. She only knows denial. How to deny the possibility of coming home."

"That is quite true. That says it completely," he said, settling back again and looking at Takver with contemplative admiration. "But Rulag isn't the only one, unfortunately. To a great many people, anyone who went to Urras and tried to come back would simply be a traitor, a spy."

"What would they actually do about it?"

"Well, if they persuaded Defense of the danger, they could shoot down the ship."

"Would Defense be that stupid?"

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"I dont think so. But anybody outside Defense could make explosives with blasting powder and blow up the ship on the ground. Or, more likely, attack me once I was outside the ship. I think that's a definite possibility. It should be included in a plan to make a round-trip tour of the scenic areas of Unas."

"Would it be worthwhile to you—that risk?"

He looked forward at nothing for a time. "Yes," he said, "in a way. If I could finish the theory there, and give it to them—to us and them and all the worlds, you know —I'd like that. Here I'm walled in. I'm cramped, it's hard to work, to test the work, always without equipment, without colleagues and students. And then when I do the work, they don't want it. Or, if they do, like Sabul, they want me to abandon initiative in return for receivmg approval. They'll use the work I do, after I'm dead, that always happens. But why must I give my Ufework as a present to Sabul, all the Sabuls, the petty, scheming, greedy egos of one single planet? I'd like to share it. It's a big subject I work on. It ought to be given out, handed around. It won't run out!"

"AH right, then," Takver said. *'it is worth it"

•'Worth what?"

"The risk. Perhaps not being able to come back."

"Not being able to come back," he repeated. He looked at Takver with a strange, intense, yet abstracted gaze.

**I think there are more people on our side, on the Syndicate's side, than we realize. It's just that we haven't actually done much—done anything to bring them together—taken any risk. If you took it, I think they'd come out in support of you. If you opened the door, they'd smell fresh air again, they'd smell freedom."

"And they might all come rushing to slam the door shut."

"If they do, too bad for them. The Syndicate can protect you when you land. And then, if people are still so hostile and hateful, we'll say the hell with them. What's the good of an anarchist society that's afraid of anarchists? We'll go live in Lonesome, in Upper Sedep, in Uttermost, we'll go live alone in the mountains if we have to. There's room. There'd be people who'd come with us. We'll make a new community. If our society is settling down into politics and power seeking, then well get out, well go

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make an Anarres beyond Anarrea, a new beginning. How's that?"

"Beautiful" he said, "it's beautiful, dear heart. But I'm not going to go to Urras, you know."

"Ob, yes. And you will come back," Takver said. Her eyes were very dark, a soft darkness, like the darkness of a forest at night. "K you set out to. You always get to where you're going. And you always come back."

"Don't be stupid, Takver. Fm not going to Urras!"

"Fm worn out," Takver said, stretching, and leaning over to put her forehead against his arm. "Let's go to

bed."

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Chapter 15

Before they broke orbit, the view ports were filled with the cloudy turquoise of Unas, immense and beautiful. But the ship turned, and the stars came into sight, and Anarres among them like a round bright rock: moving yet not moving, thrown by what hand, tunelessly circling, creating time.

They showed Shevek all over the ship, the interstellar Davenant. It was as different as it could be from the freighter Mindful From the outside it was as bizarre and fragile-looking as a sculpture in glass and wire; it did not have the look of a ship, a vehicle, about it at all, not even a front and back end, for it never traveled through any atmosphere thicker than that of interplanetary space. Inside, it was as spacious and solid as a house. The rooms were large and private, the walls wood-paneled or covered with textured weavings, the ceilings high. Only it was like a house with the blinds drawn, for few rooms had view ports, and it was very quiet. Even the bridge and the engine rooms had this quietness about them, and the machines and instruments had the simple definitiveness of design of the fittings of a sailing ship. For recreation, there was a garden, where the lighting had the quality of

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sunlight, and the air was sweet with the smell of earth and leaves; during ship night the garden was darkened, and its ports cleared to the stars.

Though its interstellar journeys lasted only a few hours or days shiptime, a near-lightspeed ship such as this might spend months exploring a solar system, or years in orbit around a planet where its crew was living or exploring. Therefore it was made spacious, humane, livable, for those who must live aboard it. Its style had neither the opulence of Urras nor the austerity of Anarres, but struck a balance, with the effortless grace of long practice. One could imagine leading that restricted life without fretting at its restrictions, contentedly, meditatively. They were a meditative people, the Hainish among the crew, civil, considerate, rather somber. There was little spontaneity in them. The youngest of them seemed older than any of the Terrans aboard.

But Shevek was seldom very observant of them, Ter-rans or Hainish, during the three days that the Davenant, moving by chemical propulsion at conventional speeds, took to go from Urras to Anarres. He replied when spoken to; he answered questions willingly, but he asked very few. When he spoke, it was out of an inward silence. The people of the Davenant, particularly the younger ones, were drawn to him, as if he had something they lacked or was something they wished to be. They discussed him a good deal among themselves, but they were shy with him.

He did not notice this. He was scarcely aware of them. He was aware of Anarres, ahead of him. He was aware of hope deceived and of the promise kept; of failure; and of the sources within his spirit, unsealed at last, of joy. He was a man released from jail, going home to his family. Whatever such a man sees along his way he sees only as reflections of the light

On the second day of the voyage he was in the communications room, talking with Anarres on the radio, first on the PDC wave length and now with the Syndicate of Initiative. He sat leaning forward, listening, or answering -with a spate of the clear, expressive language that was his native tongue, sometimes gesturing with his free hand as if his interlocutor could see him, occasionally laughing.

The first mate of the Davenant, a Hainishman named Ketho, controlling the radio contact, watched him

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thoughtfully. Ketho tad spent an hour after dinner the night before with Shevek, along with the commander and other crew members; he had asked—in a quiet, undemanding, Hainish way—a good many questions about Anarrea.

Shevek turned to him at last "AH right, done. The rest can wait till Fm home. Tomorrow they will contact you to arrange the entry procedure.'*

Ketho nodded. "You got some good news,** he said.

**Yes, I did. At least some, what do you call it, lively news." They had to speak lotic together; Shevek was more fluent in the language than Ketho, who spoke it very correctly and stiffly. The landing is going to be exciting," Shevek went on. "A lot of enemies and a lot of friends will be there. The good news is the friends. ... It seems there are more of them than when I left."

'This danger of attack, when you land,** Ketho said.

"Surety the officers of the Port of Anarres feel that they can control the dissidents? They would not deliberately tell you to come down and be murdered?"

"Wefl. they are going to protect me. But I am also a dissident, after alL I asked to take. the risk. That's my privilege, you see. as an Odonian." He smiled at Ketho.

The Hainishman did not smile back; his face was serious.

He was a handsome man of about thirty, tall and lightskinned like a Cetian, but nearly hairless like a Terran, with very strong, fine features.

"I am glad to be able to share it with you," he said. "I will be taking you down in the landing craft"

"Good," Shevek said. "It isn't everyone who would care to accept our privuegesi"

"More than you think, perhaps,** Ketbo said. **If you would allow them to."

Shevek, whose mind had not been fully on the conversation, had been about to leave; this stopped him. He looked at Ketho, and after a moment said, **Do you mean that you would like to land witk me?"

The Hainishman answered with equal directness, "Yes,

I would."

"Would the commander permit it?"

"Yes. As an officer of a mission ship, in fact, it is part of my duty to explore and investigate a new world when possible. The commander and I have spoken of the pos-

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sibility. We discussed it with our ambassadors before we left. Their feeling was that no formal request should be made, since your peopled policy is to forbid foreigners to land."

*'Hm," Shevek said, noncommittal. He went over to the far wall and stood for a while in front of a picture, a Hainish landscape, very simple and subtle, a dark river flowing among reeds under a heavy sky. "The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement of Anarres," he said, "do not permit Urrasti to land, except inside the boundary of the Port. Those terms still are accepted. But you're not an Urrasti."

"When Anarres was settled, there were no other races known. By implication, those terms include all foreigners.*'

"So our managers decided, sixty years ago, when your people first came into this solar system and tried to talk with us. But I think they were wrong. They were just building more walls." He turned around and stood, his hands behind his back, looking at the other man. "Why do you want to land, Ketho?"

"I want to see Anarres,** the Hainishman said. "Even before you came to Urras, I was curious about it. It began when I read Odo's works. I became very interested. I have—" He hesitated, as if embarrassed, but continued in his repressed, conscientious way, "I have learned a little Pravic. Not much yet"

"It is your own wish. then—your own initiative?"

"Entirely."

"And you understand that it might be dangerous?"

"Yes."

"Things are ... a little broken loose, on Anarres. That's what my friends on the radio have been telling me about.

It was our purpose all along—our Syndicate, this journey of mine—to shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchistsl All this has been going on while I was gone.

So, you see, nobody is quite sure what happens next. And

if you land with me, even more gets broken loose. I cannot push too far. I cannot take you as an official representative of some foreign government That will not do, on Anarres."

"I understand that."

"Once you are there, once you walk through the wall

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with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become aa Anarresti, with the same options as all die others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe." He looked around the tranquil, orderly room, with its simple consoles and delicate instruments, its high ceiling and windowless walls, and back at Ketho. *'You would find yourself very much alone," he said.

**My race is very old," Ketho said. "We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But i have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?"

"We are the children of time," Shevek said, in Pravic.

The younger man looked at him a moment, and then repeated the words in lotic: "We are the children of time."

**AU right." Shevek said, and laughed. "All right, am-marl You had better call Anarres on the radio again—the Syndicate, first ... I said to Keng, the ambassador, that I had nothing to give in return for what her people and yours have done for me; well, maybe I can give you something in return. An idea, a promise, a risk...."

"I shall speak to the commander," Ketho said, as grave as ever, but with a very slight tremor in his voice of excitement, of hope.

Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the Davenanfs garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. Shevek stood at the high, cleared view port, looking at the night side of Anarres, a dark curve across half the stars. He was wondering if Takver would be there, at the Port. She had not yet arrived in Abbenay from Peace-and-Plenty when he last talked with Bedap, so he had left it to Bedap to discuss and decide with her whether it would be wise for her to come out to the Port. ''You don't think I could stop her even if it wasn't?" Bedap had said. He wondered also what

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kind of ride she might have got from the Sorruba coast; a

dirigible, he hoped, if she had brought the girls along. Train riding was hard, with children. He still recalled the discomforts of the trip from Chakar to Abbenay, in '68, when Sadik had been trainsick for three mortal days.

The door of the garden room opened, increasing the dim illumination. The commander of the Davenant looked in and spoke his name; he answered; the commander came in, with Ketho.

*'We have the entry pattern for our landing craft from your ground control,'* the commander said. He was a short, iron-colored Terran, cool and businesslike. "If you're ready to go, we'll start launch procedure."

"Yes."

The commander nodded and left. Ketho came forward to stand beside Shevek at the port.

'•You're sure you want to walk through this wall with me, Ketho? You know, for me, it's easy. Whatever happens, I am coming home. But you are leaving home.

True Journey is return. ...'**

"I hope to return," Ketbo said in his quiet voice. "In time."

•'When are we to enter the landing craft?"

"In about twenty minutes."

"I'm ready. I have nothing to pack." Shevek laughed, a laugh of clear, unmixed happiness. The other roan looked at him gravely, as if he was not sure what happiness was, and yet recognized or perhaps remembered it from afar.

He stood beside Shevefc as if there was something he wanted to ask him. But he did not ask it "It will be early morning at Anarres Port," he said at last, and took his leave, to get his things and meet Shevek at the launch port

Alone, Shevek turned back to the observation port, and saw the blinding curve of sunrise over the Temae, just coming into sight

"I will lie down to sleep on Anarres tonight," he thought. "I will lie down beside Takver. I wish I'd brought the picture, the baby sheep, to give Pilun,"

But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.

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