The Dispossessed

Chapter 5

Shevek ended his career as a tourist with relief. The new term was opening at Ieu Eun; now he could settle down to live, and work, in Paradise, instead of merely looking at it from outside.

He took on two seminars and an open lecture course. No teaching was requested of him, but he had asked if he could teach, and the administrators had arranged the seminars. The open class was neither his idea nor theirs. A delegation of students came and asked him to give it. He consented at once. This was how courses were organized in Anarresti learning centers: by student demand, or on the teacher’s initiative, or by students and teachers together. When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said, “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!” He had no intention of being administered out of the course — he had fought this kind of battle before — and because he communicated his firmness to the students, they held firm. To avoid unpleasant publicity the Rectors of the University gave in, and Shevek began his course to a first-day audience of two thousand. Attendance soon dropped. He stuck to physics, never going off into the personal or the political, and it was physics on a pretty advanced level. But several hundred students continued to come. Some came out of mere curiosity, to see the man from the Moon; others were drawn by Shevek’s personality, by the glimpses of the man and the libertarian which they could catch from his words even when they could not follow his mathematics. And a surprising number of them were capable of following both the philosophy and the mathematics.

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

What they were free to do, however, was another question. It appeared to Shevek that their freedom from obligation was in exact proportion to their lack of freedom of initiative.

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

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

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

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

There was something lacking — in him, he thought, not in the place. He was not up to it. He was not strong enough to take what was so generously offered. He felt himself dry and arid, like a desert plant, in this beautiful oasis. Life on Anarres had sealed him, closed off his soul; the waters of life welled all around him, and yet he could not drink.

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

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

He got money for the papers he wrote. He already had in an account in the National Bank the 10,000 International Monetary Units of the Seo Oen award, and a grant of 5,000 from the Ioti Government. That sum was now augmented by his salary as a professor and the money paid him by the University Press for the three monographs. At first all this seemed funny to him; then it made him uneasy. He must not dismiss as ridiculous what was, after all, of tremendous importance here. He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.

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

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

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

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

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

There was a long break between terms in midautumn. Most students went home for the holiday. Shevek went mountain-hiking in the Meiteis for a few days with a group of students and researchers from the Light Research Laboratory, then returned to claim some hours on the big computer, which was kept very busy during term. But sick of work that got nowhere, he did not work hard. He slept more than usual, walked, read, and told himself that the trouble was he had simply been in too much of a hurry; you couldn’t get hold of a whole new world in a few months. The lawns and groves of the University were beautiful and disheveled, gold leaves flaring and blowing on the rainy wind under a soft grey sky. Shevek looked up the works of the great Ioti poets and read them; he understood them now when they spoke of flowers, and birds flying, and the colors of forests in autumn. That understanding came as a great pleasure to him. It was pleasant to return at dusk to his room, whose calm beauty. of proportion never failed to satisfy him. He was used to that grace and comfort now, it had become familiar to him. So had the faces at Evening Commons, the colleagues, some liked more and some less but all, by now, familiar. So had the food, in all its variety and quantity, which at first had staggered him. The men who waited tables knew his wants and served him as he would have served himself. He still did not eat meat; he had tried it, out of politeness and to prove to himself that he had no irrational prejudices, but his stomach had its reasons which reason does not know, and rebelled. After a couple of near disasters he had given up the attempt and remained a vegetarian, though a hearty one. He enjoyed dinner very much. He had gained three or four kilos since coming to Urras; he looked very well now, sunburnt from his mountain expedition, rested by the holiday. He was a striking figure as he got up from table in the great dining hall, with its beamed ceiling far overhead in shadow, and its paneled, portrait-hung walls, and its tables bright with candle flames and porcelain and silver. He greeted someone at another table and moved on, with an expression of peaceable detachment. From across the room Chifoilisk saw him, and followed him, catching up at the door.

“Have you got a few minutes to spare, Shevek?”

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

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

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

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

“I’m very well,” Shevek said, and smiled as he strode through the fresh, fine rain. “That doctor from the Government, you know, he gave me some treatments, inhalations. It works; I don’t cough. I asked the doctor to describe the process and the drugs, on the radio to the Syndicate of Initiative in Abbenay. He did so. He was glad to do so. It is simple enough; it may relieve much suffering from the dust cough. Why, why not earlier? Why do we not work together, Chifoilisk?” The Thuvian gave a little sardonic grunt. They came into the reading room of the library. Aisles of old books, under delicate double arches of marble, stood in dim serenity; the lamps on the long reading tables were plain spheres of alabaster. No one else was there, but an attendant hastened in behind them to light the fire laid on the marble hearth and to make sure they wanted nothing before he withdrew again. Chifoilisk stood before the hearth, watching the kindling catch. His brows bristled over his small eyes; his coarse, swarthy, intellectual face looked older than usual.

“I want to be disagreeable, Shevek,” he said in his hoarse voice. He added, “Nothing unusual in that, I suppose” — a humility Shevek had not looked for in him.

“What’s the matter?”

“I want to know whether you know what you’re doing here.”

After a pause Shevek said, “I think I do.”

“You are aware, then, that you’ve been bought?”

“Bought?”

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

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

“I can’t argue the values of Odonianism with you. Not that I haven’t wanted to! I do know something about it, you know. We’re a lot closer to it, in my country, than these people are. We’re products of the same great revolutionary movement of the eighth century — we’re socialists, like you.”

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

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

“Does he establish the value of his own labor?”

“Why don’t you come to Thu and see how real socialism functions?”

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

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

“Not now, Chifoilisk.”

“But what can you accomplish — here?”

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

“The CWG? They’ve been in A-Io’s pocket for thirty years. Don’t look to them to save you!”

A pause. “Am I in danger, then?”

“You didn’t realize even that?”

Another pause.

“against whom do you warn me?” Shevek asked.

“against Pae, in the first place.”

“Oh, yes, Pae.” Shevek leaned his hands against the ornate, gold-inlaid mantelpiece. “Pae is a pretty good physicist. And very obliging. But I don’t trust him.”

“Why not?”

“Well… he evades.”

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

While Chifoilisk spoke, Shevek’s relaxed posture had stiffened; he now stood straight, like Chifoilisk, looking down at the fire. He said, “How do you know that about Pae?”

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

“Are you also an agent of your government?”

Chifoilisk’s face closed down; then he turned suddenly to Shevek, speaking softly and with hatred. “Yes,” ho said, “of course I am. If I weren’t I wouldn’t be here, Everyone knows that. My government sends abroad only men whom it can trust. And they can trust me! Because I haven’t been bought, like all these damned rich Ioti professors. I believe in my government, in my country. I have faith in them.” He forced his words out in a kind of torment. “You’ve got to look around you, Shevek! You’re a child among thieves. They’re good to you, they give you a nice room, lectures, students, money, tours of castles, tours of model factories, visits to pretty villages. All the best. All lovely, fine! But why? Why do they bring you here from the Moon, praise you, print your books, keep you so safe and snug in the lecture rooms and laboratories and libraries? Do you think they do it out of scientific, disinterest, out of brotherly love? This is a profit economy, Shevek!”

“I know. I came to bargain with it”

“Bargain — what? For what?”

Shevek’s face had taken on the cold, grave look it had worn when he left the Fort in Drio. “You know what I want Chifoilisk. I want my people to come out of exile. I came here because I don’t think you want that, in Thu. You are afraid of us, there. You fear we might bring back the revolution, the old one, the real one, the revolution for justice which you began and then stopped halfway. Here in A-Io they fear me less because they have forgotten the revolution. They don’t believe in it any more. They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity. I want free exchange between Urras and Anarres. I worked for it as I could on Anarres, now I work for it as I can on Urras. There, I acted. Here, I bargain.”

“With what?”

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

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

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

Chifoilisk insisted: “Does it exist in writing?”

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

“Good!”

“Why?”

“Because if it did, they’d have it”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Listen, wasn’t it Odo who said that where there’s property there’s theft?”

“’To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.’ The Social Organism.”

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

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

“To you. Not to me. I haven’t your individualistic moral scruples, you know. I knew you didn’t have the Theory down in writing. If I’d thought you had, I would have made every effort to get it from you, by persuasion, by theft, by force if I thought we could abduct you without bringing on a war with A-Io. Anything, so that I could get it away from these fat Ioti capitalists and into the hands of the Central Presidium of my country. Because the highest cause I can ever serve is the strength and welfare of my country.”

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

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

“They don’t want it,” Shevek said, expressionless. “Do you think I did not try?”

Four or five days later Shevek, asking after Chifoilisk, was informed that he had gone back to Thu. “To stay? He didn’t tell me he was leaving.”

“A Thuvian never knows when he’s going to get an order from his Presidium,” Pae said, for of course it was Pae who told Shevek. “He just knows that when it comes he’d better hop. And not stop for any leavetakings on the way. Poor old Chif! I wonder what he did wrong?”

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

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

Once, as they sat together on the glassed-in porch where he raised all kinds of rare and out-of-season flowers, he chanced to use the phrase, “we Cetians.” Shevek caught him up on it: “’Cetians’ — isn’t that a birdseed word?”

“Birdseed” was slang for the popular press, the newspapers, broadcasts, and fiction manufactured for the urban working people.

“Birdseed!” Atro repeated. “My dear fellow, where the devil do you pick up these vulgarisms? I mean by ‘Cetians’ precisely what the daily-paper writers and their lip-moving readers understand by the term. Urras and Anarres!”

“I was surprised that you used a foreign word — a non-Cetian word, in fact.”

“Definition by exclusion,” the old man parried gleefully. “A hundred years ago we didn’t need the word. ‘Mankind’ would do. But sixty-some years ago that changed. I was seventeen, it was a nice sunny day in early summer, I remember it quite vividly. I was exercising my horse, and my elder sister called out the window, They’re talking to somebody from Outer Space on the radio!’ My poor dear mother thought we were all doomed; foreign devils, you know. But it was only the Hainish, quacking about peace and brotherhood. Well, nowadays ‘mankind’ is a bit over-inclusive. What defines brotherhood but nonbrotherhood? Definition by exclusion, my dear! You and I are kinsmen. Your people were probably herding goats in the mountains while mine were oppressing serfs in Sie, a few centuries ago; but we’re members of the same family. To know it, one only has to meet — to hear of — an alien, A being from another solar system. A man, so-called, who has nothing in common with us except the practical arrangement of two legs, two arms, and a head with some kind of brain in it!”

“But haven’t the Hainish proved that we are—”

“All of alien origin, offspring of Hainish interstellar colonists, half a million years ago, or a million, or two or three million, yes, I know. Proved! By the Primal Number, Shevek, you sound like a first-year seminarian! How can you speak seriously of historical proof, over such a span of time? Those Hainish toss millennia about like handballs, but it’s all juggling. Proof, indeed! The religion of my fathers informs me, with equal authority, that I’m a descendant of Pinra Od, whom God exiled from the Garden because he had the audacity to count his fingers and toes, add them up to twenty, and thus let Time loose upon the universe. I prefer that story to the aliens’, if I must choose!”

Shevek laughed; Atro’s humors gave him pleasure. But the old man was serious. He tapped Shevek on the arm, and, twitching his eyebrows and munching with his lips as he did when he was moved, said, “I hope you feel the same, my dear. I earnestly hope it. There’s a great deal that’s admirable, I’m sure, in your society, but it doesn’t teach you to discriminate — which is after all the best thing civilization teaches. I don’t want those damned aliens getting at you through your notions about brotherhood and mutualism and all that. They’ll spout you whole rivers of ‘common humanity’ and ‘leagues of all the worlds’ and so on, and I’d hate to see you swallow it. The law of existence is struggle — competition — elimination of the weak — a ruthless war for survival. And I want to see the best survive. The kind of humanity I know. The Cetians. You and I: Urras and Anarres. We’re ahead of them now, all those Hainish and Terrans and whatever else they call themselves, and we’ve got to stay ahead of them. They brought us the interstellar drive, but we’re making better interstellar ships now than they are. When you come to release your theory, I earnestly hope you’ll think of your duty to your own people, your own kind. Of what loyalty means, and to whom it’s due.” The easy tears of old age had sprung into Atro’s half-blind eyes. Shevek put his hand on the old man’s arm, reassuring, but he said nothing.

“They’ll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I want us to take our rightful place. I want respect: and that’s what you can win us. Transilience — if we’ve mastered transilience, their interstellar drive won’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not money I want, you know. I want the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiority of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar civilization, then by God I don’t want my people to be low-caste members of it! We should come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands — that’s how it should be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way, how’s it going, your book?”

“I’ve been working on Skask’s gravitational hypothesis. I have a feeling he’s wrong in using partial differential equations only.”

“But your last paper was on gravity. When are you going to get to the real thing?”

“You know that the means are the end, to us Odonians,” Shevek said lightly. “Besides, I can’t very well present a theory of time that omits gravity, can I?”

“You mean you’re giving it to us in bits and dribbles?” Atro asked, suspiciously. “That hadn’t occurred to me. I’d better look over that last paper. Some of it didn’t make much sense to me. My eyes get so tired these days. I think that damnable magnifier-projector-thingy I have to use for reading has something wrong with it. It doesn’t seem to project the words clearly any more.”

Shevek looked at the old man with compunction and affection, but he did not tell him any more about the state of his theory.

Invitations to receptions, dedications, openings, and so forth were delivered to Shevek daily. He went to some, because be had come to Urras on a mission and must try to fulfill it: he must urge the idea of brotherhood, he must represent, in his own person, the solidarity of the Two Worlds. He spoke, and people listened to him and said, “How true.”

He wondered why the government did not stop him from speaking. Chifoilisk must have exaggerated, for his own purposes, the extent of the control and censorship they could exert. He talked pure anarchism, and they did not stop him. But did they need to stop him? It seemed that he talked to the same people every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the only kind of people on Urras? “It is pain that brings men together,” Shevek said standing up before them, and they nodded and said, “How true.”

He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations.

But to do so was to accept failure and to increase his isolation. He wasn’t doing what he had come here to do. It was not that they cut him off, he told himself; it was that — as always — he had cut himself off from them. He was lonely, stiflingly lonely, among all the people he saw every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch. He felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras in all these months.

In the Senior Commons at table one night he said, “You know, I don’t know how you live, here. I see the private houses, from the outside. But from the inside I know only your not-private life — meeting rooms, refectories, laboratories—”

The next day Oiie rather stiffly asked Shevek if he would come to dinner and stay overnight, the next weekend, at Oiie’s home.

It was in Amoeno, a village a few miles from Ieu Eun, and it was by Urrasti standards a modest middle-class house, older than most, perhaps. It had been built about three hundred years ago, of stone, with wood-paneled rooms. The characteristic Ioti double arch was used in window frames and doorways. A relative absence of furniture pleased Shevek’s eye at once: the rooms looked austere, spacious, with their expanses of deeply polished floor. He had always felt uneasy amidst the extravagant decorations and conveniences of the public buildings in which the receptions, dedications, and so forth were held. The Urrasti had taste, but it seemed often to be in conflict with an impulse toward display — conspicuous expense. The natural, aesthetic origin of the desire to own things was concealed and perverted by economic and competitive compulsions, which in turn told on the quality of the things: all they achieved was a kind of mechanical lavishness. Here, instead, was grace, achieved through restraint.

A serving man took their coats at the door. Oiie’s wife came up to greet Shevek from the basement kitchen, where she had been instructing the cook.

As they talked before dinner, Shevek found himself speaking to her almost exclusively, with a friendliness, a wish to make her like him, that surprised himself. But it was so good to be talking with a woman again! No wonder he had felt his existence to be cut off, artificial, among men, always men, lacking the tension and attraction of the sexual difference. And Sewa Oiie was attractive. Looking at the delicate lines of her nape and temples he lost his objections to the Urrasti fashion of shaving women’s heads. She was reticent, rather timid; he tried to make her feel at ease with him, and was very pleased when he seemed to be succeeding.

They went in to dinner and were joined at the table by two children. Sewa Oiie apologized: “One simply can’t find a decent nursemaid in this part of the country any more,” she said. Shevek assented, without knowing what a nursemaid was. He was watching the little boys, with the same relief, the same delight. He had scarcely seen a child since he left Anarres.

They were very clean, sedate children, speaking when spoken to, dressed in blue velvet coats and breeches. They eyed Shevek with awe, as a creature from Outer Space. The nine-year-old was severe with the seven-year-old, muttering at him not to stare, pinching him savagely when he disobeyed. The little one pinched back and tried to kick him under the table. The Principle of Superiority did not seem to be well established in his mind yet.

Oiie was a changed man at home. The secretive look left his face, and he did not drawl when he spoke. His family treated him with respect, but there was mutuality in the respect. Shevek had heard a good deal of Oiie’s views on women, and was surprised to see that he treated his wife with courtesy, even delicacy. “This is chivalry,” Shevek thought, having recently learned the word, but he soon decided it was something better than that. Oiie was fond of his wife and trusted her. He behaved to her and to his children very much as an Anarresti might. In fact, at home, he suddenly appeared as a simple, brotherly kind of man, a free man.

It seemed to Shevek a very small range of freedom, a very narrow family, but he felt so much at ease, so much freer himself, that he was disinclined to criticize.

In a pause after conversation, the younger boy said in his small, clear voice, “Mr. Shevek doesn’t have very good manners.”

“Why not?” Shevek asked before Oiie’s wife could reprove the child, “What did I do?”

“You didnt say thank you.”

“For what?”

“When I passed you the dish of pickles.”

“Ini! Be quiet!”

Sadik! Don’t egoize! The tone was precisely the same.

“I thought you were sharing them with me. Were they a gift? We say thank you only for gifts, in my country. We share other things without talking about it, you see. Would you like the pickles back again?”

“No, I don’t like them,” the child said, looking up with dark, very clear eyes into Shevek’s face.

“That makes it particularly easy to share them,” Shevek said. The older boy was writhing with the suppressed desire to pinch Ini, but Ini laughed, showing his little white teeth. After a while in another pause he said in a low voice, leaning towards Shevek, “Would you like to see my otter?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in the back garden. Mother put him out because she thought he might bother you. Some grownups don’t like animals.”

“I like to see them. We have no animals in my country.”

“You don’t?” said the older boy, staring. “Father! Mr. Shevek says they don’t have any animals!”

Ini also stared. “But what do you have?”

“Other people. Fish. Worms. And holum trees.”

“What are holum trees?”

The conversation went on for half an hour. It was the first time Shevek had been asked, on Urras, to describe Anarres. The children asked the questions, but the parents listened with interest. Shevek kept out of the ethical mode with some scrupulousness; he was not there to propagandize his host’s children. He simply told them what the Dust was like, what Abbenay looked like, what kind of clothes one wore, what people did when they wanted new clothes, what children did in school. This last became propaganda, despite his intentions. Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included farming, carpentry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, roadmending, playwriting, and all the other occupations of the adult community, and by his admission that nobody was ever punished for anything.

“Though sometimes,” he said, “they make you go away by yourself for a while.”

“But what,” Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, “what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?”

“Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository. As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”

“All right, but how do you get people to do the dirty work?”

“What dirty work?” asked Oiie’s wife, not following.

“Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said; Shevek added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the Ioti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.

“Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they’re for one half year only.”

“But then the whole personnel must consist of people just learning the job.”

“Yes. It’s not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can’t tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?”

“He can refuse the order?”

“It’s not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab — the Division of Labor office — and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.”

“But then why do people do the dirty work at all? Why do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?”

“Because they are done together… And other reasons. You know, life on Anarres isn’t rich, as it is here. In the little communities there isn’t very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenthday it’s pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people… And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can — egoize, we call it — show off? — to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing… But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mighty force.”

“No one ever defies it?”

“Perhaps not often enough,” Shevek said.

“Does everybody work so hard, then?” Oiie’s wife asked. “What happens to a man who just won’t cooperate?”

“Well, he moves on. The others get tired of him, you know. They make fun of him, or they get rough with him, beat him up; in a small community they might agree to take his name off the meals listing, so he has to cook and eat all by himself; that is humiliating. So he moves on, and stays in another place for a while, and then maybe moves on again. Some do it all their lives. Nuchnibi, they’re called. I am a sort of nuchnib. I am here evading my own work posting. I moved farther than most.” Shevek spoke tranquilly; if there was bitterness in his voice it was not discernible to the children, nor explicable to the adults. But a little silence followed on his words.

“I don’t know who does the dirty work here,” he said. “I never see it being done. It’s strange. Who does it? Why do they do it? Are they paid more?”

“For dangerous work, sometimes. For merely menial tasks, no. Less.”

“Why do they do them, then?”

“Because low pay is better than no pay,” Oiie said, and the bitterness in his voice was quite clear. His wife began speaking nervously to change the subject, but he went on, “My grandfather was a janitor. Scrubbed floors and changed dirty sheets in a hotel for fifty years. Ten hours a day, six days a week. He did it so that he and his family could eat.” Oiie stopped abruptly, and glanced at Shevek with his old secretive, distrustful look, and then, almost with defiance, at his wife. She did not meet his eyes. She smiled and said in a nervous, childish voice, “Demaere’s father was a very successful man. He owned four companies when he died.” Her smile was that of a person in pain, and her dark, slender hands were pressed tightly one over the other.

“I don’t suppose you have successful men on Anarres,” Oiie said with heavy sarcasm. Then the cook entered to change the plates, and he stopped speaking at once. The child Ini, as if knowing that the serious talk would not resume while the servant was there, said, “Mother, may Mr. Shevek see my otter when dinner’s over?”

When they returned to the sitting room Ini was allowed to bring in his pet: a half-grown land otter, a common animal on Urras. They had been domesticated, Oiie explained, since prehistoric times, first for use as fish retrievers, then as pets. The creature had short legs, an arched and supple back, glossy dark-brown fur. It was the first uncaged animal Shevek had seen close up, and it was more fearless of him than he was of it. The white, sharp teeth were impressive. He put his hand out cautiously to stroke it, as Ini insisted he do. The otter sat up on its haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. “Ammar,” Shevek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of being — “brother.”

The otter grunted, dropped to all fours, and examined Shevek’s shoes with interest.

“He likes you,” Ini said.

“I like him,” Shevek replied, a little sadly. Whenever he saw an animal, the flight of birds, the splendor of autumn trees, that sadness came into him and gave delight a cutting edge. He did not think consciously of Takver at such moments, he did not think of her absence. Rather it was as if she were there though he was not thinking about her. It was as if the beauty and strangeness of the beasts and plants of Urras had been charged with a message for him by Takver, who would never see them, whose ancestors for seven generations had never touched an animal’s warm fur or seen the flash of wings in the shade of trees.

He spent the night in a bedroom under the eaves. It was cold, which was welcome after the perpetual overheating of rooms at the University, and quite plain: the bedstead, bookcases, a chest, a chair, and a painted wooden table. It was like home, he thought, ignoring the height of the bedstead and the softness of the mattress, the fine woollen blankets and silk sheets, the knickknacks of ivory on the chest, the leather bindings of the books, and the fact that the room, and everything in it, and the house it was in, and the land the house stood on, was private property, the property of Demaere Oiie, though he hadn’t built it, and didn’t scrub its floors. Shevek put aside such tiresome discriminations. It was a nice room and not really so different from a single in a domicile.

Sleeping in that room, he dreamed of Takver. He dreamed that she was with him in the bed, that her arms were about him, her body against his body… but what room, what room were they in? Where were they? They were on the Moon together, it was cold, and they were walking along together. It was a flat place, the Moon, all covered with bluish-white snow, though the snow was thin and easily kicked aside to show the luminous white ground. It was dead, a dead place. “It isn’t really like this,” he told Takver, knowing she was frightened. They were walking towards something, a distant line of some thing that looked flimsy and shiny like plastic, a remote, hardly visible barrier across the white plain of snow. In his heart Shevek was afraid to approach it, but he told Takver, “We’ll be there soon.” She did not answer him.