The Dispossessed

Chapter 7

Shevek found a letter in a pocket of the new, fleece-lined coat he had ordered for winter from the shop in the nightmare street. He had no idea how the letter had got there. It certainly had not been in the mail delivered to him thrice daily, which consisted entirely of manuscripts and reprints from physicists all over Urras, invitations to receptions, and artless messages from schoolchildren. This was a flimsy piece of paper stuck down to itself without envelope; it bore no stamp or frank from any of the three competing mail companies.

He opened it, vaguely apprehensive, and read: “If you are an Anarchist why do you work with the power system betraying your World and the Odonian Hope or are you here to bring us that Hope. Suffering from injustice and repression we look to the Sister World the light of freedom in the dark night. Join with us your brothers!” There was no signature, no address.

It shook Shevek both morally and intellectually, jolted him, not with surprise but with a kind of panic. He knew they were here: but where? He had not met one, not seen one, he had not met a poor man yet. He had let a wall be built around him and had never noticed. He had accepted shelter, like a propertarian. He had been co-opted — just as Chifoilisk had said.

But he did not know how to break down the wall. And if he did, where could he go? The panic closed in on him tighter. To whom could he turn? He was surrounded on all sides by the smiles of the rich.

“I’d like to talk with you, Efor.”

“Yes sir. Excuse me, sir, I make room set this down here.”

The servant handled the heavy tray deftly, flicked off dish covers, poured out the bitter chocolate so it rose frothing to the cup’s rim without spill or splatter. He clearly enjoyed the breakfast ritual and his adeptness at it, and as clearly wanted no unusual interruptions in it. He often spoke quite clear Iotic, but now as soon as Shevek said he wanted a talk Efor had slid into the staccato of the city dialect. Shevek had learned to follow it a little; the shift of sound values was consistent once you caught it, but the apocopations left him groping. Half the words were left out. It was like a code, he thought: as if the “Nioti,” as they called themselves, did not want to be understood by outsiders.

The manservant stood awaiting Shevek’s pleasure. He knew — he had learned Shevek’s idiosyncrasies within the first week — that Shevek did not want him to hold a chair, or to wait on him while he ate. His erect attentive pose was enough to wither any hope of informality.

“Will you sit down, Efor?”

“If you please sir,” the man replied. He moved a chair half an inch, but did not sit down in it.

“This is what I want to talk about. You know I don’t like to give you orders.”

“Try manage things like you want sir without troubling for orders.”

“You do — I don’t mean that. You know, in my country nobody gives any orders.”

“So I hear sir.”

“Well, I want to know you as my equal, my brother. You are the only one I know here who is not rich — not one of the owners. I want very much to talk with you, I want to know about your life—”

He stopped in despair, seeing the contempt on Efor’s lined face. He had made all the mistakes possible. Efor took him for a patronizing, prying fool.

He dropped his hands to the table in a gesture of hopelessness and said, “Oh, hell, I am sorry, Efor!” I cannot say what I mean. Please ignore it”

“Just as you say sir.” Efor withdrew.

That was the end of that. The “unpropertied classes” remained as remote from him as when he had read about them in history at Northsetting Regional Institute.

Meanwhile, he had promised to spend a week with the Oiies, between winter and spring terms.

Oiie had invited him to dinner several times since his first visit, always rather stiffly, as if he were carrying out a duty of hospitality, or perhaps a governmental order. In his own house, however, though never wholly off his guard with Shevek, he was genuinely friendly. By the second visit his two sons had decided that Shevek was an old friend, and their confidence in Shevek’s response obviously puzzled their father. It made him uneasy; he could not really approve of it; but he could not say it was unjustified. Shevek behaved to them like an old friend, like an elder brother. They admired him, and the younger, Ini, came to love him passionately, Shevek was kind, serious honest, and told very good stories about the Moon; but there was more to it than that. He represented something to the child that Ini could not describe. Even much later in his life, which was profoundly and obscurely influenced by that childhood fascination, Ini found no words for it, only words that held an echo of it: the word voyager, the word exile.

The only heavy snow of the winter fell that week. Shevek had never seen a snowfall of more than an inch or so. The extravagance, the sheer quantity, of the storm exhilarated him. He reveled in its excess. It was too white, too cold, silent, and indifferent to be called excremental by the sincerest Odonian; to see it as other than an innocent magnificence would be pettiness of soul. As soon as the sky cleared he went out in it with the boys, who appreciated it just as he did. They ran around in the big back garden of the Oiie house, threw snowballs, built tunnels, castles, and fortresses of snow.

Sewa Oiie stood with her sister-in-law Vea at the window, watching the children, the man, and the little otter playing. The otter had made himself a snowslide down one wall of the snow castle and was excitedly tobogganing down it on his belly over and over again. The boys’ cheeks were fiery. The man, his long, rough, dun-grey hair tied back with a piece of string and his ears red with cold, executed tunneling operations with energy. “Not here! — Dig there! — Where’s the shovel? — Ice in my pocket!” — the boys’ high voices rang out continually.

“There is our alien,” Sewa said, smiling.

“The greatest physicist alive,” said the sister-in-law. “How funny!”

When he came in, puffing and stamping off snow and exhaling that fresh, cold vigor and well-being which only people just in out of the snow possess, he was introduced to the sister-in-law. He put out his big, hard, cold hand and looked down at Vea with friendly eyes. “You are Demaere’s sister?” he said. “Yes, you look like him.” And this remark, which from anyone else would have struck Vea as insipid, pleased her immensely. “He is a man,” she kept thinking that afternoon, “a real man. What is it about him?”

Vea Doem Oiie was her name, in the Ioti mode; her husband Doem was the head of a large industrial combine and traveled a good deal, spending half of each year abroad as a business representative of the government. This was explained to Shevek, while he watched her. In her, Demaere Oiie’s slightness, pale coloring, and oval black eyes had been transmuted into beauty. Her breasts, shoulders, and arms were round, soft, and very white. Shevek sat beside her at the dinner table. He kept looking at her bare breasts, pushed upward by the stiff bodice. The notion of going thus half naked in freezing weather was extravagant, as extravagant as the snow, and the small breasts had also an innocent whiteness, like the snow. The curve of her neck went up smoothly into the curve of the proud, shaven, delicate head.

She really is quite attractive, Shevek informed himself. She’s like the beds here: soft. Affected, though. Why does she mince out her words like that?

He clung to her rather thin voice and mincing manner as to a raft on deep water, and never knew it, never knew he was drowning. She was going back to Nio Esseia on the train after dinner, she had merely come out for the day and he would never see her again.

Oiie had a cold, Sewa was busy with the children. “Shevek, do you think you might walk Vea to the station?”

“Good Lord, Demaere! Don’t make the poor man protect me! You don’t think there’ll be wolves, do you? Will savage Mingrads come sweeping into town and abduct me to their harems? Will I be found on the stationmaster’s doorstep tomorrow morning, a tear frozen in my eye and my tiny, rigid hands clasping a bunch of withered posies? Oh, I do rather like that!” Over Vea’s rattling, tinkling talk her laugh broke like a wave, a dark, smooth, powerful wave that washed out everything and left the sand empty. She did not laugh with herself but at herself, the body’s dark laughter, wiping out words.

Shevek put on his coat in the hall and was waiting for her at the door.

They walked in silence for a half a block. Snow crunched and squeaked under their feet.

“You’re really much too polite for…”

“For what?”

“For an anarchist,” she said, in her thin and affectedly drawling voice (it was the same intonation Pae used, and Oiie when he was at the University). “I’m disappointed. I thought you’d be dangerous and uncouth.”

“I am.”

She glanced up at him sidelong. She wore a scarlet shawl tied over her head; her eyes looked black and bright against the vivid color and the whiteness of snow all around.

“But here you are tamely walking me to the station, Dr. Shevek.”

“Shevek,” he said mildly. “No’doctor.’”

“Is that your whole name — first and last?”

He nodded, smiling. He felt well and vigorous, pleased by the bright air, the warmth of the well-made coat he wore, the prettiness of the woman beside him. No worries or heavy thoughts had hold on him today.

“Is it true that you get your names from a computer?”

“Yes.”

“How dreary, to be named by a machine!”

“Why dreary?”

“It’s so mechanical, so impersonal.”

“But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?”

“No one else? You’re the only Shevek?”

“While I live. There were others, before me.”

“Relatives, you mean?”

“We don’t count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see. I don’t know who they were, except for one, in the early years of the Settlement. She designed a kind of bearing they use in heavy machines, they still call it a ‘shevek.’ ” He smiled again, more broadly. “There is a good immortality!”

Vea shook her head. “Good Lord!” she said. “How do you tell men from women?”

“Well, we have discovered methods…”

After a moment her soft, heavy laugh broke out. She wiped her eyes, which watered in the cold air. “Yes, perhaps you are uncouth!… Did they all take made-up names, then, and learn a made-up language — everything new?”

“The Settlers of Anarres? Yes. They were romantic people, I suppose.”

“And you’re not?”

“No. We are very pragmatic.”

“You can be both,” she said.

He had not expected any subtlety of mind from her. “Yes, that’s true,” he said.

“What’s more romantic than your coming here, all alone, without a coin in your pocket, to plead for your people?”

“And to be spoiled with luxuries while I am here.”

“Luxuries? In university rooms? Good Lord! You poor dear! Haven’t they taken you anywhere decent?”

“Many places, but all the same. I wish I could come to know Nio Esseia better. I have seen only the outside of the city — the wrapping of the package.” He used the phrase because he had been fascinated from the start by the Urrasti habit of wrapping everything up in clean, fancy paper or plastic or cardboard or foil. Laundry, books, vegetables, clothes, medicines, everything came inside layers and layers of wrappings. Even packets of paper were wrapped in several layers of paper. Nothing was to touch anything else. He had begun to feel that he, too, had been carefully packaged.

“I know. They made you go to the Historical Museum, and take a tour of the Dobunnae Monument, and listen to a speech in the Senate!” He laughed, because that had been precisely the itinerary one day last summer. “I know! They’re so stupid with foreigners. I shall see to it that you see the real Nio!”

“I should like that.”

“I know all kinds of wonderful people. I collect people. Here you are trapped among all these stuffy professors and politicians…” She rattled on. He took pleasure in her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and the snow.

They came to the little station of Amoeno. She had her return ticket; the train was due in any moment.

“Don’t wait, you’ll freeze.”

He did not reply but just stood, bulky in the fleece-lined coat, looking amiably at her.

She looked down at the cuff of her coat and brushed a speck of snow off the embroidery.

“Have you a wife, Shevek?”

“No.”

“No family at all?”

“Oh — yes. A partner; our children. Excuse me, I was thinking of something else. A wife, you see. I think of that as something that exists only on Urras.”

“What’s a ‘partner’?” She glanced up mischievously into his face.

“I think you would say a wife or husband.”

“Why didn’t she come with you?”

“She did not want to; and the younger child is only one… no, two, now. Also—” He hesitated.

“Why didn’t she want to come?”

“Well, there she has work to do, not here. If I had known how she would like so many things here, I would have asked her to come. But I did not. There is the question of safety, you see.”

“Safety here?”

He hesitated again, and finally said, “Also when I go home.”

“What will happen to you?” Vea asked, round-eyed. The train was pulling over the hill outside town.

“Oh, probably nothing. But there are some who consider me a traitor. Because I try to make friends with Urras, you see. They might make trouble when I go home. I don’t want that for her and the children. We had a little of it before I left. Enough.”

“You’ll be in actual danger, you mean?”

He bent toward her to hear, for the train was pulling into the station with a clatter of wheels and carriages. “I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “You know, our trains look very much like these? A good design need not change.” He went with her to a first-class carriage. Since she did not open the door, he did. He put his head in after her, looking around the compartment. “Inside they are not alike, though! This is all private — for yourself?”

“Oh, yes. I detest second class. Men chewing maera-gum and spitting. Do people chew maera on Anarres? No, surely not. Oh, there are so many things I’d love to know about you and your country!”

“I love to tell about it, but nobody asks.”

“Do let’s meet again and talk about it, then! When you’re next in Nio, will you call me? Promise.”

“I promise,” he said good-naturedly.

“Good! I know you don’t break promises. I don’t know anything about you yet, except that. I can see that. Goodbye, Shevek.” She put her gloved hand on his for a moment as he held the door. The engine gave its two-note honk; he shut the door, and watched the train pull out. Vea’s face a flicker of white and scarlet at the window.

He walked back to the Oiies’ in a very cheerful frame of mind, and had a snowball battle with Ini until dark.

The birdseed paper was excited into its hugest typeface. Spelling and grammar fell by the wayside; it read like Efor talking: “By last night rebels hold all west of Meskti and pushing army hard…” It was the verbal mode of the Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged unstable present tense.

Shevek read the papers and looked up a description of Benbili in the CWG Encyclopedia. The nation was in form a parliamentary democracy, in fact a military dictatorship, run by generals. It was a large country in the western hemisphere, mountains and arid savannahs, underpopulated, poor. “I should have gone to Benbili,” Shevek thought, for the idea of it drew him; he imagined pale plains, the wind blowing. The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale. Its reports, and those of the official telefax in public rooms, were brief and dry: a queer contrast to the popular papers, which shouted Revolution! on every page.

General Havevert, the President, got away safe in his famous armored airplane, but some lesser generals were caught and emasculated, a punishment the Benbili traditionally preferred to execution. The retreating army burned the fields and towns of their people as they went. Guerrilla partisans harried the army. The revolutionaries in Meskti, the capital, opened the jails, giving amnesty to all prisoners. Reading that, Shevek’s heart leapt. There was hope, there was still hope… He followed the news of the distant revolution with increasing intensity. On the fourth day, watching a telefax broadcast of debate in the Council of World Governments, he saw the Ioti ambassador to the CWG announce that A-Io, rising to the support of the democratic government of Benbili, was sending armed reinforcements to President-General Havevert.

The Benbili revolutionaries were mostly not even armed. The Ioti troops would come with guns, armored cars, airplanes, bombs. Shevek read the description of their equipment in the paper and felt sick at his stomach.

He felt sick and enraged, and there was nobody he could talk to. Pae was out of the question. Atro was an ardent militarist. Oiie was an ethical man, but his private insecurities, his anxieties as a property owner, made him cling to rigid notions of law and order. He could cope with his personal liking for Shevek only by refusing to admit that Shevek was an anarchist. The Odonian society called itself anarchistic, he said, but they were in fact mere primitive populists whose social order functioned without apparent government because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbor states. When their property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would either wake up to reality or be wiped out. The Benbili rebels were waking up to reality now: they were finding freedom is no good if you have no guns to back it up. He explained this to Shevek in the one discussion they had on the subject. It did not matter who governed, or thought they governed, the Benbilis; the politics of reality concerned the power struggle between A-Io and Thu.

“The politics of reality,” Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, “That is a curious phrase for a physicist to use.”

“Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of the world.”

“You put your petty miserable ‘laws’ to protect wealth, your ‘forces’ of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!”

Oiie shrank from that thunderbolt of contempt. He said no more, and Shevek said no more, but Oiie never forgot it. It lay imbedded in his mind thereafter as the most shameful moment of his life. For if Shevek the deluded and simple-minded utopist had silenced him so easily, that was shameful; but if Shevek the physicist and the man whom he could not help liking, admiring, so that he longed to deserve his respect, as if it were somehow a finer grade of respect than any currently available elsewhere — if this Shevek despised him, then the shame was intolerable, and he must hide it, lock it away the rest of his life in the darkest room of his soul.

The subject of the Benbili revolution had sharpened certain problems for Shevek also: particularly the problem of his own silence.

It was difficult for him to distrust the people he was with. He had been brought up in a culture that relied deliberately and constantly on human solidarity, mutual aid. Alienated as he was in some ways from that culture, and alien as he was to this one, still the lifelong habit remained: he assumed people would be helpful. He trusted them.

But Chifoilisk’s warnings, which he had tried to dismiss, kept returning to him. His own perceptions and instincts reinforced them. Like it or not, he must learn distrust. He must be silent; he must keep his property to himself, he must keep his bargaining power.

He said little, these days, and wrote down less. His desk was a moraine of insignificant papers; his few working notes were always right on his body, in one of his numerous Urrasti pockets. He never left his desk computer without clearing it.

He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly for their spaceflight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do so. He had never admitted either fact clearly to anyone.

Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in his grasp. He had the equations. Sabul knew he had them, and had offered him reconciliation, recognition, in return for the chance to print them and get in on the glory. He had refused Sabul, but it had not been a grand moral gesture. The moral gesture, after all, would have been to give them to his own press at the Syndicate of Initiative, and he hadn’t done that either. He wasn’t quite sure he was ready to publish. There was something not quite right, something that needed a little refining. As he had been working ten years on the theory, it wouldn’t hurt to take a little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth.

The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right through the foundations… The night before he left Anarres he had burned every paper he had on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them.

Or had he been bluffing himself?

It was quite possible that a general theory of temporality was an illusory goal. It was also possible that, though Sequency and Simultaneity might someday be unified in a general theory, he was not the man to do the job. He had been trying for ten years and had not done it. Mathematicians and physicists, athletes of intellect, do their great work young. It was more than possible — probable — that he was burnt out, finished.

He was perfectly aware that he had had the same low moods and intimations of failure in the periods just before his moments of highest creativity. He found himself trying to encourage himself with that fact, and was furious at his own naivete. To interpret temporal order as causal order was a pretty stupid thing for a chronosophist to do. Was he senile already? He had better simply get to work on the small but practical task of refining the concept of interval. It might be useful to someone else.

But even in that, even in talking with other physicists about it, he felt that he was holding something back. And they knew he was.

He was sick of holding back, sick of not talking, not talking about the revolution, not talking about physics, not talking about anything.

He crossed the campus on his way to a lecture. The birds were singing in the newly leafed trees. He had not heard them sing all winter, but now they were at it, pouring it out, the sweet tunes. Ree-dee, they sang, tee-dee. This is my propertee-tee, this is my territoree-ree-ree, it belongs to mee, mee.

Shevek stood still for a minute under the trees, listening.

Then he turned off the path, crossed the campus in a different direction, towards the station, and caught a morning train to Nio Esseia. There had to be a door open somewhere on this damned planet!

He thought, as he sat in the train, of trying to get out of A-Io: of going to Benbili, maybe. But he did not take the thought seriously. He would have to ride on a ship or airplane, he would be traced and stopped. The only place where he could get out of sight of his benevolent and protective hosts was in their own big city, under their noses.

It was not an escape. Even if he did get out of the country, he would still be locked in, locked in Urras. You couldn’t call that escape, whatever the archists, with their mystique of national boundaries, might call it. But he suddenly felt cheerful, as he had not for days, when he thought that his benevolent and protective hosts might think, for a moment, that he had escaped.

It was the first really warm day of spring. The fields were green, and flashed with water. On the pasture lands each stock beast was accompanied by her young. The infant sheep were particularly charming, bouncing like white elastic balls, their tails going round and round. In a pen by himself the herd sire, ram or bull or stallion, heavy-necked, stood potent as a thundercloud, charged with generation. Gulls swept over brimming ponds, white over blue, and white clouds brightened the pale blue sky. The branches of orchard trees were tipped with red, and a few blossoms were open, rose and white. Watching from the train window Shevek found his restless and rebellious mood ready to defy even the day’s beauty. It was an unjust beauty. What had the Urrasti done to deserve it? Why was it given to them, so lavishly, so graciously, and so little, so very little, to his own people?

I’m thinking like an Urrasti, he said to himself. Like a damned propertarian. As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life! He tried to think of nothing at all, to let himself be borne forward and to watch the sunlight in the gentle sky and the little sheep bouncing in the fields of spring.

Nio Esseia, a city of five million souls, lifted its delicate glittering towers across the green marshes of the Estuary as if it were built of mist and sunlight. As the train swung in smoothly on a long viaduct the city rose up taller, brighter, solider, until suddenly it enclosed the tram entirely in the roaring darkness of an underground approach, twenty tracks together, and then released it and its passengers into the enormous, brilliant spaces of the Central Station, under the central dome of ivory and azure, said to be the largest dome ever raised on any world by the hand of man.

Shevek wandered across acres of polished marble under that immense ethereal vault, and came at last to the long array of doors through which crowds of people came and went constantly, all purposeful, all separate. They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever the cause, it gave all the faces a certain sameness, and he felt very much alone among them. In escaping his guides and guards he had not considered what it might be like to be on one’s own in a society where men did not trust one another, where the basic moral assumption was not mutual aid, but mutual aggression. He was a little frightened.

He had vaguely imagined wandering about the city and getting into conversation with people, members of the unpropertied class, if there still was such a thing, or the working classes, as they called them. But all these people hurried along, on business, wanting no idle talk, no waste of their valuable time. Their hurry infected him. He must go somewhere, he thought, as he came out into the sunlight and the crowded magnificence of Moie Street. Where? The National Library? The Zoo? But he did not want to sightsee.

Irresolute, he stopped in front of a shop near the station that sold newspapers and trinkets. The headline of the paper said THU SENDS TROOPS TO AID BENBILI REBELS, but he did not react to it. He looked at the color photographs in the rack, instead of the newspaper. It occurred to him that he had no mementos of Urras. When one traveled one ought to bring back a souvenir. He liked the photographs, scenes of A-Io: the mountains he had climbed, the skyscrapers of Nio, the university chapel (almost the view out his window), a farm girl in pretty provincial dress, the towers of Rodarred, and the one that had first caught his eye, a baby sheep in a flowered meadow, kicking its legs and, apparently, laughing. Little Pilun would like that sheep. He selected one of each card and took them to the counter. “And five’s fifty and the lamb makes it sixty; and a map, right you are, sir, one forty. Nice day, spring’s here at last, isn’t it, sir? Nothing smaller than that, sir?” Shevek had produced a twenty-unit bank note. He fumbled out the change he had received when he bought his ticket, and, with a little study of the denominations of the bills and coins, got together one unit forty. That’s right, sir. Thank you and have a pleasant day!”

Did the money buy the politeness, as well as the postcards and the map? How polite would the shopkeeper have been if he had come in as an Anarresti came in to a goods depository: to take what he wanted, nod to the registrar, and walk out?

No use, no use thinking this way. When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.

There were no parks in downtown Nio, the land was far too valuable to waste on amenity. He kept getting deeper into the same great, glittering streets that he had been taken through many times. He came to Saemtenevia Street and crossed it hurriedly, not wanting a repetition of the daylight nightmare. Now he was in the commercial district. Banks, office buildings, government buildings. Was all Nio Esseia this? Huge shining boxes of stone and glass, immense, ornate, enormous packages, empty, empty.

Passing a ground-floor window marked Art Gallery, he turned in, thinking to escape the moral claustrophobia of the streets and find the beauty of Urras again in a museum. But all the pictures in the museum had price tickets attached to their frames. He stared at a skillfully painted nude. Her ticket read 4,000 IMU. “That’s a Fei Feite,” said a dark man appearing noiselessly at his elbow. “We had five a week ago. Biggest thing on the art market before long. A Feite is a sure investment, sir.”

“Four thousand units is the money it costs to keep two families alive for a year in this city,” Shevek said.

The man inspected him and said drawling, “Yes, well, you see, sir, that happens to be a work of art.”

“Art? A man makes art because he has to. Why was that made?”

“You’re an artist, I take it,” the man said, now with open insolence.

“No, I am a man who knows shit when he sees it!” The dealer shrank back. When he was out of Shevek’s reach, he began to say something about the police. Shevek grimaced and strode out of the shop. Halfway down the block he stopped. He couldn’t go on this way,

But where could he go?

To someone… to someone, another person. A human being. Someone who would give help, not sell it Who? Where?

He thought of Oiie’s children, the little boys who liked him, and for some time could think of no one else. Then an image rose in his mind, distant, small, and clear: Oiie’s sister. What was her name? Promise you’ll call, she had said, and since then she had twice written him invitations to dinner parties, in a bold childish hand, on thick, sweet-scented paper. He had ignored them, among all the invitations from strangers. Now he remembered them.

He remembered at the same time the other message, the one that had appeared inexplicably in his coat pocket: Join with us your brothers. But he could not find any brothers, on Urras.

He went into the nearest shop. It was a sweetshop, a golden scrolls and pink plaster, with rows of glass cas full of boxes and tins and baskets of candies and confections, pink, brown, cream, gold. He asked the woman behind the cases if she would help him find a telephone number. He was now subdued, after his fit of bad temper in the art dealer’s, and so humbly ignorant and foreign that the woman was won over. She not only helped him look up the name in the ponderous directory of telephone numbers, but placed the call for him on the shop phone.

“Hello?”

He said, “Shevek.” Then he stopped. The telephone to him was a vehicle of urgent needs, notifications of deaths, births, and earthquakes. He had no idea what to say.

“Who? Shevek? Is it really? How dear of you to call! I don’t mind waking up at all if it’s you.”

“You were sleeping?”

“Sound asleep, and I’m still in bed. It’s lovely and warm. Where on earth are you?”

“On Kae Sekae Street, I think.”

“Whatever for? Come on out. What time is it? Good Lord, nearly noon. I know, I’ll meet you halfway. By the boat pool in the Old Palace gardens. Can you find it? Listen, you must stay, I’m having an absolutely paradisial party tonight.” She rattled on awhile; he agreed to all she said. As he came out past the counter the shopwoman smiled at him. “Better take her a box of sweets, hadn’t you, sir?”

He stopped. “Should I?”

“Never does any harm, sir.”

There was something impudent and genial in her voice. The air of the shop was sweet and warm, as if all the perfumes of spring were crowded into it. Shevek stood there amidst the cases of pretty little luxuries, tall, heavy, dreamy, like the heavy animals in their pens, the rams and bulls stupefied by the yearning warmth of spring.

“I’ll make you up just the thing,” the woman said, and she filled a little metal box, exquisitely enameled, with miniature leaves of chocolate and roses of spun sugar. She wrapped the tin in tissue paper, put the packet in a silvered cardboard box, wrapped the box in heavy rose colored paper, and tied it with green velvet ribbon. In all her deft movements a humorous and sympathetic complicity could be sensed, and when she handed Shevek the completed package, and he took it with muttered thanks and turned to go, there was no sharpness in her voice as she reminded him, “That’s ten sixty, sir.” She might even have let him go, pitying him, as women will pity strength; but he came back obediently and counted out the money.

He found his way by subway train to the gardens of the Old Palace, and to the boat pool, where charmingly dressed children sailed toy ships, marvelous little craft with silken cordage and brasswork like jewelry. He saw Vea across the broad, bright circle of the water and went around the pool to her, aware of the sunlight, and the spring wind, and the dark trees of the park putting forth their early, pale-green leaves.

They ate lunch at a restaurant in the park, on a terrace covered with a high glass dome. In the sunlight inside the dome the trees were in full leaf, willows, hanging over a pool where fat white birds paddled, watching the diners with indolent greed, awaiting scraps. Vea did not take charge of the ordering, making it clear that Shevek was in charge of her, but skillful waiters advised him so smoothly that he thought he had managed it all himself; and fortunately he had plenty of money in his pocket. The food was extraordinary. He had never tasted such subtleties of flavor. Used to two meals a day, he usually skipped the lunch the Urrasti ate, but today he ate right through it, while Vea delicately picked and pecked. He had to stop at last, and she laughed at his rueful look.

“I ate too much.”

“A little walk might help.”

It was a very little walk: a slow ten-minute stroll over the grass, and then Vea collapsed gracefully in the shade of a high bank of shrubs, all bright with golden flowers. He sat down by her. A phrase Takver used came into his mind as he looked at Vea’s slender feet, decorated with little white shoes on very high heels. “A body profiteer,” Takver called women who used their sexuality as a weapon in a power struggle with men. To look at her, Vea was the body profiteer to end them all. Shoes, clothes, cosmetics, jewels, gestures, everything about her asserted provocation. She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being. She incarnated all the sexuality the Ioti repressed into their dreams, their novels and poetry, their endless paintings of female nudes, their music, their architecture with its curves and domes, their candies, their baths, their mattresses. She was the woman in the table.

Her head, entirely shaved, had been dusted with a talc containing tiny flecks of mica dust, so that a faint glitter obscured the nakedness of the contours. She wore a filmy shawl or stole, under which the forms and texture of her bare arms showed softened and sheltered. Her breasts were covered: Ioti women did not go outside with naked breasts, reserving their nudity for its owners. Her wrists were laden with gold bracelets, and in the hollow of her throat a single jewel shone blue against the soft skin,

“How does that stay there?”

“What?” Since she could not see the jewel herself she could pretend to be unaware of it, obliging him to point, perhaps to bring his hand up over her breasts to touch the jewel. Shevek smiled, and touched it. “It is glued on?”

“Oh, that. No, I’ve got a tiny little magnet set in there, and it’s got a tiny little bit of metal on the back, or is it the other way round? Anyhow, we stick together.”

“You have a magnet under your skin?” Shevek inquired with unsophisticated distaste.

Vea smiled and removed the sapphire so he could see that there was nothing but the tiniest silver dimple of a scar. “You do disapprove of me so totally — it’s refreshing. I feel that whatever I say or do, I can’t possibly lower myself in your opinion, because I’ve already reached bottom!”

“That is not so,” he protested. He knew she was playing, but knew few of the rules of the game.

“No, no; I know moral horror when I see it. Like this.” She put on a dismal scowl; they both laughed. “Am I so different from Anarresti women, really?”

“Oh, yes, really.”

“Are they all terribly strong, with muscles? Do they wear boots, and have big flat feet, and sensible clothing, and shave once a month?”

“They don’t shave at all.”

“Never? Not anywhere? Oh, Lord! Let’s talk about something else.”

“About you.” He leaned on the grassy bank, near enough to Vea that he was surrounded by the natural and artificial perfumes of her body. “I want to know, is an Urrasti woman content to be always inferior?”

“Inferior to whom?”

“To men.”

“Oh — that! What makes you think I am?”

“It seems that everything your society does is done by men. The industry, arts, management, government, decisions. And all your life you bear the father’s name and the husband’s name. The men go to school and you don’t go to school; they are all the teachers, and judges, and police, and government, aren’t they? Why do you let them control everything? Why don’t you do what you like?”

“But we do. Women do exactly as they like. And they don’t have to get their hands dirty, or wear brass helmets, or stand about shouting in the Directorate, to do it.”

“But what is it that you do?”

“Why, run the men, of course! And you know, it’s perfectly safe to tell them that, because they never believe it They say, ‘Haw haw, funny little woman!’ and pat your head and stalk off with their medals jangling, perfectly self-content.”

“And you too are self-content?”

“Indeed I am.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Because it doesn’t fit your principles. Men always have theories, and things always have to fit them.”

“No, not because of theories, because I can see that you are not content. That you are restless, unsatisfied, dangerous.”

“Dangerous!” Vea laughed radiantly. “What an utterly marvelous compliment! Why am I dangerous, Shevek?”

“Why, because you know that in the eyes of men you are a thing, a thing owned, bought, sold. And so you think only of tricking the owners, of getting revenge—”

She put her small hand deliberately on his mouth. “Hush,” she said. “I know you don’t intend to be vulgar. I forgive you. But that’s quite enough.”

He scowled savagely at the hypocrisy, and at the realization that he might really have hurt her. He could still feel the brief touch of her hand on his lips. “I am sorry!” he said.

“No, no. How can you understand, coming from the Moon? And you’re only a man, anyway… I’ll tell you something, though. If you took one of your ‘sisters’ up there on the Moon, and gave her a chance to take off her boots, and have an oil bath and a depilation, and put on a pair of pretty sandals, and a belly jewel, and perfume, she’d love it. And you’d love it too! Oh, you would! But you won’t, you poor things with your theories. All brothers and sisters and no fun!”

“You are right,” Shevek said. “No fun. Never. All day long on Anarres we dig lead in the bowels of the mines, and when night comes, after our meal of three holum grains cooked in one spoonful of brackish water, we antiphonally recite the Sayings of Odo, until it is time to go to bed. Which we all do separately, and wearing boots.”

His fluency in Iotic was not sufficient to permit him the word flight this might have been in his own language, one of his sudden fantasies which only Takver and Sadik had heard often enough to get used to; but, lame as it was, it startled Vea. Her dark laugh broke out, heavy and spontaneous. “Good Lord, you’re funny, too! Is there anything you aren’t?”

“A salesman,” he said.

She studied him, smiling. There was something professional, actress-like, in her pose. People do not usually gaze at one another intently at very close range, unless they are mothers with infants, or doctors with patients, or lovers.

He sat up. “I want to walk more,” he said.

She reached up her hand for him to take and help her rise. The gesture was indolent and inviting, but she said with an uncertain tenderness in her voice, “You really are like a brother… Take my hand. I’ll let you go again!”

They wandered along the paths of the great garden. They went into the palace, preserved as a museum of the ancient times of royalty, as Vea said she loved to look at the jewelry there. Portraits of arrogant lords and princes stared at them from the brocade-covered walls and the carven chimneypieces. The rooms were full of silver, gold, crystal, rare woods, tapestries, and jewels. Guards stood behind the velvet ropes. The guards’ black and scarlet uniforms consorted well with the splendors, the hangings of spun gold, the counterpanes of woven feathers, but their faces did not match; they were bored faces, tired, tired of standing all day among strangers doing a useless task. Shevek and Vea came to a glass case in which lay the cloak of Queen Teaea, made of the tanned skins of rebels flayed alive, which that terrible and defiant woman had worn when she went among her plague-stricken people to pray God to end the pestilence, fourteen hundred years ago. “It looks awfully like goatskin to me,” Vea said, examining the discolored, time-tattered rag in the glass case. She glanced up at Shevek. “Are you all right?”

“I think I would like to go outside this place.”

Once outside in the garden his face became less white, but he looked back at the palace walls with hatred. “Why do you people cling to your shame?” he said,

“But it’s all just history. Things like that couldn’t happen now!”

She took him to a matinee at the theater, a comedy about young married people and their mothers-in-law, full of jokes about copulation which never mentioned copulation. Shevek attempted to laugh when Vea did. After that they went to a downtown restaurant, a place of incredible opulence. The dinner cost a hundred units. Shevek ate very little of it, having eaten at noon, but he gave in to Vea’s urging and drank two or three glasses of wine, which was pleasanter than he had expected it to be, and seemed to have no deleterious effect on his thinking. He had not enough money to pay for the dinner, but Vea made no offer to share the cost, merely suggesting that he write a check, which he did. They then took a hired car to Vea’s apartment; she also let him pay the driver. Could it be, he wondered, that Vea was actually a prostitute, that mysterious entity? But prostitutes as Odo wrote of them were poor women, and surely Vea was not poor; “her” party, she had told him, was being got ready by “her” cook, “her” maid, and “her” caterer. Moreover men at the University spoke of prostitutes contemptuously as dirty creatures, while Vea, despite her continual allurements, displayed such sensitivity to open talk about anything sexual that Shevek watched his language with her as he might have done, at home, with a shy child of ten. All together, he did not know what exactly Vea was.

Vea’s rooms were large and luxurious, with glittering views of the lights of Nio, and furnished entirely in white, even the carpeting. But Shevek was getting callous to luxury, and besides was extremely sleepy. The guests were not due to arrive for an hour. While Vea was changing her clothes, he fell asleep in a huge white armchair in the living room. The maid rattling something on the table woke him in time to see Vea come back in, dressed now in Ioti formal evening wear for women, a full-length pleated skirt draped from the hips, leaving the whole torso naked. In her navel a little jewel glittered, just as in the pictures he had seen with Tirin and Bedap a quarter-century ago at the Northsetting Regional Institute of Science, just so… Half awake and wholly roused, he stared at her.

She gazed back at him, smiling a little.

She sat down on a low, cushioned stool near him, so she could look up into his face. She arranged her white skirt over her ankles, and said, “Now, tell me how it really is between men and women on Anarres.”

It was unbelievable. The maid and the caterer’s man were both in the room; she knew he had a partner, and he knew she did; and not a word about copulating had passed between them. Yet her dress, movements, tone — what were they but the most open invitation?

“Between a man and a woman there is what they want there to be between them,” he said, rather roughly. “Each, and both.”

“Then it’s true, you really have no morality?” she asked, as if shocked but delighted.

“I don’t know what you mean. To hurt a person there is the same as to hurt a person here.”

“You mean you have all the same old rules? You see, I believe that morality is just another superstition, like religion. It’s got to be thrown out.”

“But my society,” he said, completely puzzled, “is an attempt to reach it. To throw out the moralizing, yes — the rules, the laws, the punishments — so that men can see good and evil and choose between them.”

“So you threw out all the do’s and don’ts. But you know, I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You threw out the priests and judges and divorce laws and all that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it’s still there.

You’re just as much slaves as ever! You aren’t really free.”

“How do you know?”

“I read an article in a magazine about Odonianism,” she said. “And we’ve been together all day. I don’t know you, but I know some things about you. I know that you’ve got a — a Queen Teaea inside you, right inside that hairy head of yours. And she orders you around just like the old tyrant did her serfs. She says, ‘Do this!’ and you do, and ‘Don’t!’ and you don’t.”

“That is where she belongs,” he said, smiling. “Inside my head.”

“No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel against her. You would have! Your great-greatgrandfather did; at least he ran off to the Moon to get away. But he took Queen Teaea with him, and you’ve still got her!”

“Maybe. But she has learned, on Anarres, that if she tells me to hurt another person, I hurt myself.”

“The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!”

“Your civilization, perhaps. Ours hides nothing. It is all plain. Queen Teaea wears her own skin, there. We follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution.”

“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!”

“Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.”

“I don’t care about hurting and not hurting. I don’t care about other people, and nobody else does, either. They pretend to. I don’t want to pretend. I want to be free!”

“But Vea,” he began, with tenderness, for the plea for freedom moved him very much, but the doorbell rang. Vea stood up, smoothed her skirt, and advanced smiling to welcome her guests.

During the next hour thirty or forty people came. At first Shevek felt cross, dissatisfied, and bored. It was just another of the parties where everybody stood about with glasses in their hands smiling and talking loudly. But presently it became more entertaining. Discussions and arguments got going, people sat down to talk, it began to be like a party at home. Delicate little pastries and bits of meat and fish were passed around, glasses were constantly refilled by the attentive waiter. Shevek accepted a drink. He had watched Urrasti guzzling alcohol for months now, and none of them had seemed to fall ill from it. The stuff tasted like medicine, but somebody explained that it was mostly carbonated water, which he liked. He was thirsty, so he drank it right off.

A couple of men were determined to talk physics with him. One of them was well mannered, and Shevek managed to evade him for a while, for he found it hard to talk physics with nonphysicists. The other was overbearing, and no escape was possible from him; but irritation, Shevek found, made it much easier to talk. The man knew everything, apparently because he had a lot of money. “As I see it,” he informed Shevek, “your Simultaneity Theory simply denies the most obvious fact about time, the fact that time passes.”

“Well, in physics one is careful about what one calls ‘facts.’ It is different from business,” Shevek said very mildly and agreeably, but there was something in his mildness that made Vea, chatting with another group nearby, turn around to listen. “Within the strict terms of Simultaneity Theory, succession is not considered as a physically objective phenomenon, but as a subjective one.”

“Now stop trying to scare Dearri, and tell us what that means in baby talk,” Vea said. Her acuteness made Shevek grin.

“Well, we think that time ‘passes,’ flows past us, but what if it is we who move forward, from past to future, always discovering the new? It would be a little like reading a book, you see. The book is all there, all at once, between its covers. But if you want to read the story and understand it, you must begin with the first page, and go forward, always in order. So the universe would be a very great book, and we would be very small readers.”

“But the fact is,” said Dearri, “that we experience the universe as a succession, a flow. In which case, what’s the use of this theory of how on some higher plane it may be all eternally coexistent? Fun for you theorists, maybe, but it has no practical application, no relevance to real life.

Unless it means we can build a time machine!” he added with a kind of hard, false joviality.

“But we don’t experience the universe only successively,” Shevek said. “Do you never dream, Mr. Dearri?” He was proud of himself for having, for once, remembered to call someone ‘Mr.’

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“It is only in consciousness, it seems, that we experience time at all. A little baby has no time; he can’t distance himself from the past and understand how it relates to his present, or plan how his present might relate to his future. He does not know time passes; he does not understand death. The unconscious mind of the adult is like that still. In a dream there is no time, and succession is all changed about, and cause and effect are all mixed together. In myth and legend there is no time. What past is it the tale means when it says ‘Once upon a time’? And so, when the mystic makes the reconnection of his reason and his unconscious, he sees all becoming as one being, and understands the eternal return.”

“Yes, the mystics,” the shyer man said, eagerly. “Tebores, in the Eighth Millennium. He wrote, The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.”

“But we’re not babies,” Dearri cut in, “we’re rational men. Is your Simultaneity some kind of mystical regressivism?”

There was a pause, while Shevek helped himself to a pastry which he did not want, and ate it. He had lost his temper once today and made a fool of himself. Once was enough.

“Maybe you could see it,” he said, “as an effort to strike a balance. You see, Sequency explains beautifully our sense of linear time, and the evidence of evolution. It includes creation, and mortality. But there it stops. It deals with all that changes, but it cannot explain why things also endure. It speaks only of the arrow of time — never of the circle of time.”

“The circle?” asked the politer inquisitor, with such evident yearning to understand that Shevek quite forgot Dearri, and plunged in with enthusiasm, gesturing with hands and arms as if trying to show his listener, materially, the arrows, the cycles, the oscillations he spoke of. “Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn’t it? And two orbits, two years, and so on. One can count the orbits endlessly — an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time. It constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or noncyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tiny time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.”

“You can’t assert two contradictory statements about the same thing,” said Dearri, with the calmness of superior knowledge. “In other words, one of these ‘aspects’ is real, the other’s simply an illusion.”

“Many physicists have said that,” Shevek assented.

“But what do you say?” asked the one who wanted to know.

“Well, I think it’s an easy way out of the difficulty… Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore… If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chronosophy should provide a field in which the relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood.”

“But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding’,” Dearri said, “if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn’t it.”

“You ask questions like a true profiteer,” Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction. Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, “I don’t really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book — that everything really all exists now — then couldn’t we foretell the future? If it’s already there?”

“No, no,” the shyer man said, not at all shyly. “It’s not there like a couch or a house. Time isn’t space. You can’t walk around in it!” Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dearri and said, “It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics. Would you agree to that, Dr. Shevek?”

“Ethics? Well, I don’t know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behavior.”

“Why not?” said Dearri.

Shevek ignored him. “But it’s true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.”

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

“That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture — you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So which do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both.”

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

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

“All very well, but what industry needs is answers,” said Dearri.

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

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

Shevek resolved to say nothing more, no matter what he was asked. He was thirstier than ever; he let the waiter refill his glass, and drank the pleasant, fizzy stuff. He looked around the room, trying to dissipate his anger and tension in watching other people. But they were also behaving very emotionally, for Ioti — shouting, laughing loudly, interrupting each other. One pair was indulging in sexual foreplay in a corner. Shevek looked away, disgusted. Did they egoize even in sex? To caress and copulate in front of unpaired people was as vulgar as to eat in front of hungry people. He returned his attention to the group around him. They were off prediction, now, and onto politics. They were all disputing about the war, about what Thu would do next, what A-Io would do next, what the CWG would do next.

“Why do you talk only in abstractions?” he inquired suddenly, wondering as he spoke why he was speaking, when he had resolved not to. “It is not names of countries, it is people killing each other. Why do the soldiers go? Why does a man go kill strangers?”

“But that’s what soldiers are for,” said a little fair woman with an opal in her navel. Several men began to explain the principle of national sovereignty to Shevek. Vea interrupted, “But let him talk. How would you solve the mess, Shevek?”

“Solution’s in plain sight.”

“Where?”

“Anarres!”

“But what you people do on the Moon doesn’t solve our problems here.”

“Man’s problem is all the same. Survival. Species, group, individual.”

“National self-defense—” somebody shouted.

They argued, he argued. He knew what he wanted to say, and knew it must convince everyone because it was clear and true, but somehow he could not get it said properly. Everybody shouted. The little fair woman patted the broad arm of the chair she was sitting in, and he sat down on it. Her shaven, silken head came peering up under his arm. “Hello, Moon Man!” she said. Vea had joined another group for a time, but now was back near him. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked large and liquid. He thought he saw Pae across the room, but there were so many faces that they blurred together. Things happened in fits and starts, with blanks in between, as if he were being allowed to witness the operation of the Cyclic Cosmos of old Gvarab’s hypothesis from behind the scenes. “The principle of legal authority must be upheld, or we’ll degenerate into mere anarchy!” thundered a fat, frowning man. Shevek said, “Yes, yes, degenerate! We have enjoyed it for one hundred and fifty years now.” The little fair woman’s toes, in silver sandals, peeped out from under her skirt, which was sewn all over with hundreds and hundreds of tiny pearls. Vea said, “But tell us about Anarres — what’s it really like? Is it so wonderful there really?”

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

Something dark turned over in Shevek’s mind, darkening everything. His mouth was dry. He finished the glassful the waiter had just poured him. “I don’t know,” he said; his tongue felt half paralyzed. “No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dust and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful, here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free — possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes — the wall, the wall!”

They were all looking at him.

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

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

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

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

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

“For God’s sake!” Vea said, looking down at her skirt in the dim light, twitching the pleats away from her. “Really! Now I’ll have to change my dress.”

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

“I’ll take him home,” Pae said.

“Do, for heaven’s sake,” said Vea. “Were you looking for him, Saio?”

“Oh, a bit. Fortunately Demaere called you.”

“You are certainly welcome to him.”

“He won’t be any trouble. Passed out in the hall. May I use your phone before I go?”

“Give my love to the Chief,” Vea said archly.

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

“Was he with your sister all day, Demaere?”

“Since noon, apparently.”

“Thank God!”

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

“I don’t care what he sees. We don’t want him seen. Have you been reading the birdseed papers? Or the broadsheets that were circulating last week in Old Town, about the ‘Forerunner’? The myth — the one who comes before the millennium — ‘a stranger, an outcast, an exile, bearing in empty hands the time to come.’ They quoted that. The rabble are in one of their damned apocalyptic moods. Looking for a figurehead. A catalyst. Talking about a general strike. They’ll never learn. They need a lesson all the same. Damned rebellious cattle, send them to fight Thu, it’s the only good we’ll ever get from them.”

Neither man spoke again during the ride.

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

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

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

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