The Dispossessed

Chapter 10

“Nothing you can do with Southwest,” said the driver, “but get across it.”

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 ram, 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.

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 he 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’s 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 good!” 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 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 don’t see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around enough in your teens, that’s 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, too! 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 doesn’t come with just moving around. I was all over Anarrea, 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 tell 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 isn’t 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. Four 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!”

“We needed the phosphates.”

“But they say, when the provisions train was stopped in Portal, they kept the mills going, and people died of 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 foodstuffs; one truckload, at most, for Upper Sedep. This is an ores run. But if I got on a provisions run, and they stopped me, 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 knowl”

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 I’ve 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 damn! I can’t add up figures like that. I don’t know if it’s right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?”

The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations — just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t 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 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. Aren’t we Odonians? A man can lose his 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 tram he was in charge of, he 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 coining home. “Damn, look at that dustl Someday well come down here and there won’t 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 the right were thick with scrub holum; lines 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 bled a little and he felt a strangeness: no jolt, 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 so 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.

Sherat, Takver, No. 3.

He knocked, watching the reflection of the hall light in the dark surface of the door, which did not hang quite true in its frame. A woman said, “Come in!” 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 then they held each other, they came together and stood holding each other on the unreliable earth.

“Come in,” Takver said, “oh come in, come in.”

Shevek opened his eyes. Farther into the room, which still seemed very bright, he 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 I’m 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 catt tonight. Not come tonight! Oh, don’t cry, Sadiki, look, I’m not any more, am I?”

“The man cried too.”

“Of 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 bad 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 doesn’t 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 Shevek 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 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 smiled. Her skin i 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 you’ll want to stay here?” he said.

“I don’t care,” she said, in her strange, dark, husky voice.

“Your nose is still dribbling,” Sadik remarked, keenly, but without emotional bias.

“Be glad that’s all,” Shevek said. Takver said, “Hush, Sadik, don’t egoize!” 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 reposting?”

“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 temporalist, like the father!”

“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’s baby?” she inquired, with a broad, gleeful smile.

“Of course.”

“When did I learn how to really talk?”

“At about one half year old,” said Takver, “and you have never shut up since. Where’s the hat. Sadikiki?”

“At school. I hate the hat I wear!” she informed Shevek.

They walked the child through the windy streets to the learning-center dormitory and took 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 whiter, 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 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 side 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 years ago,” Shevek said. “It 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. Sabul was waiting to tell me I was through at the Institute.”

“If I’d been there, you wouldn’t have gone down to the Dust.”

“Maybe not, but we mightn’t have kept postings together. For a while ft seemed as if nothing could bold 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, isn’t it?… But by damn, I will do my own work for a while now!”

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 you!”

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 wall. “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 building in Chakar. Regular dinner was over, but the cooks were eating, and provided the traveler a bowl of stew and all the bread he 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, “don’t 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, “Don’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 stern in the 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 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 silence of the bills. 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 long 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 fiberboard case, his name printed large on it in black ink; all Anarresti 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 Soutbrising. 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 deftness 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 book will do, till I can get a nail from Supplies. Do you know who made it, Sadik?”

“No — 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 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 turned 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 he 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.”

“No, it wasn’t We must have used a blanket up in the Ne Theras.”

“If we did, I don’t remember it” Takver laughed. “Who did you ask about?”

“Tirin.”

“Don’t remember.”

“At Northsetting Regional. Dark boy, snub nose—”

“Oh, Tirin! Of course. I was thinking of Abbenay.”

“I saw him, in Southwest.”

“You saw Tirin? How was he?”

Shevek said nothing for a while, tracing out the weave of 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 don’t 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 Anarres. 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 nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was 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, ” must not! It is not moral! It is not good business? Poor Tirin! 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?”

“No, before, in Elbow. He was janitor for the mill.”

“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 he had to do was ignore itl”

“Tir was crazy already. By our society’s standards.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think Tir’s a bora 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 naively, 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 immoral and said he shouldn’t get a teaching posting, he decided everybody was against him? That’s a bit silly!”

“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 same thing, exactly. We always say that. You said it — yon should have refused to to to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I’m a cee 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, like a room where we can come and say, ‘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 FDC posts us, and stay till we’re reposted.”

“Oh, Shev, that’s not true. Only 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 Fool. 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 is 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 skeptical! 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 nuchnibi?”

HNo, no. Nuchnibi are important.”

“Well, several of Dap’s friends — that nice composer, Salas, and some of the scruffy ones too. And real nuchnibi 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 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 posting!”

“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 criminal! 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, lawa of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we cant 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 Ms 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 be haunts you,” she said. “His play. Your book.”

“But I’m luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist cant hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.”

Takver watched him from the corner of her eye for some time, then turned over and sat up, pulling the blanket up around her shoulders. “Err! It’s cold… I was wrong, wasn’t I, about the book. About letting Sabul cut it up and put his name on it. It seemed right It seemed like setting the work before the workman, pride before vanity, community before ego, all that. But it wasn’t really that at all, was it? It was a capitulation. A surrender to Sabul’s authoritarianism.”

“I don’t know. It did get the thing printed.”

“The right end, but the wrong means! I thought about it 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 vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.

“Well, no. It was lovely, having Sadik! 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 freej 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 builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

“It may get pretty drafry,” Takver said, huddled in blankets. She leaned against him, and be put his arm around her shoulders. “I expect it will,” he said.

Long after Takver had fallen asleep that night Shevek lay awake, his hands under his bead, 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, who 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; just 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 will 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 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 bad 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 home.

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 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.