The Dispossessed

Chapter 8

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

They were talking, all rather desultorily except for Tak-ver. She had danced for hours, eaten quantities of fried bread and pickles, and was feeling very lively. “Why did Kvigot get posted to the Reran Sea fisheries, where he’ll have to start all over again, while Turib takes on his research program here?” she was saying. Her research syndicate had been assimilated into a project managed directly by PDC, and she had become a strong partisan of some of Bedap’s ideas. “Because Kvigot is a good biologist who doesn’t agree with Simas’s fuddy-duddy theories, and Turib is a nothing who scrubs Simas’s back in the baths. See who takes over directing the program when Simas retires. She will, Turib will, I’ll bet you!”

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

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

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

“How did one of their words get into Pravic?”

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

“What’s hell, then?” Takver asked. “I used to think it meant the shit depot in the town where I grew up. ‘Go to hell!’ The worst place to go.”

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

“On Urras, it means the place you go to when you’re damned.”

“That’s a posting to Southwest in summer,” said Terras, an ecologist, an old friend of Takver’s.

“It’s in the religious mode, in Iotic.”

“I know you have to read Iotic, Shev, but do you have to read religion?”

“Some of the old Urrasti physics is all in the religious mode. Concepts like that come up, ‘Hell’ means the place of absolute evil.”

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

Bedap came pumping up, dust-whitened, sweat streaked. He sat down heavily beside Shevek and panted.

“Say something in Iotic,” asked Richat, a student of Shevek’s, “What does it sound like?”

“You know: Hell! Damn!”

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

Shevek good-naturedly said a sentence in Iotic. “I don’t really know how it’s pronounced,” he added, “I just guess.”

“What did it mean?”

“// the passage of time is a feature of human consciousness, past and future are functions of the mind. From a pre-Sequentist, Keremcho.”

“How weird to think of people speaking and you couldn’t understand them!”

“They can’t even understand each other. They speak hundreds of different languages, all the crazy archists on the Moon…”

“Water, water,” said Bedap, still panting.

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

“If it goes on, we’ll have to recycle urine, the way they did in the Year 20. Glass of piss, Shev?”

“Don’t joke,” said Terras. “That’s the thread we walk on. Will it rain enough? The leaf crops in Southrising are a dead loss already. No rain there for thirty decads.”

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

“Never be another Great Drought,” Desar said, “Modern desalinization plants. Prevent.”

“They might help alleviate it,” Terms said.

Winter that year came early, cold, and dry in the Northern Hemisphere. Frozen dust on the wind in the low, wide streets of Abbenay. Water to the baths strictly rationed: thirst and hunger outranked cleanliness. Food and clothing for the twenty million people of Anarres came from the holum plants, leaf, seed, fiber, root. There was› some stockpile of textiles in the warehouses and depots, but there had never been much reserve of food. Water went to the land, to keep the plants alive. The sky over the city was cloudless and would have been clear, but it was yellowed with dust windborne from drier lands to the south and west Sometimes when the wind blew down from the north, from the Ne Theras, the yellow haze cleared and left a brilliant, empty sky, dark blue hardening to purple at the zenith.

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

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

The room was dark. The lights had just come on in the city; they looked weak under the high, dark-grey sky. Takver came in, lit the lamp, crouched down in her overcoat by the heat grating. “Oh it’s cold! Awful. My feet feel like I’ve been walking on glaciers, I nearly cried on the way home they hurt so. Rotten profiteering boots! Why cant we make a decent pair of boots? What are you sitting in the dark for?”

“I don’t know.”

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

“No.”

“Don’t be sulky. Please don’t be sulky tonight. If one more thing goes wrong, I’ll cry, I’m sick of crying all the time. Damned stupid hormones! I wish I could have babies like the fish, lay the eggs and swim off and that’s the end of it. Unless I swam back and ate them… Don’t sit and look like a statue like that. I just can’t stand it.” She was slightly in tears, as she crouched by the breath of heat from the grating, trying to unfasten her boots with stiff fingers.

Shevek said nothing.

“What is it? You can’t just sit there!”

“Sabul called me in today. He won’t recommend the Principles for publication, or export.”

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

“The critique he wrote is on the table.”

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

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

“He’s done so.”

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

“There’s nothing to do.”

“We’ll print the book. Form a printing syndicate, learn., to set type, and do it.”

“Paper’s at minimum ration. No nonessential printing.

Only PDC publications, till the tree-holum plantations are safe.”

“Then can you change the presentation somehow? Disguise what you say. Decorate it with Sequency trimmings. So that hell accept it.”

“You can’t disguise black as white.”

She did not ask if he could bypass Sabul or go over his head. Nobody on Anarres was supposed to be over anybody’s head. There were no bypasses. If you could not work in solidarity with your syndics, you worked alone.

“What if…” She stopped. She got up and put her boots by the heater to dry. She took off her coat, hung it up, and put a heavy hand-loomed shawl over her shoulders. She sat down on the bed platform, grunting a little as she lowered herself the last few inches. She looked up at Shevek, who sat in profile between her and the windows,

“What if you offered to let him sign as co-author? Like the first paper you wrote.”

“Sabul won’t put his name to’superstitious-religious speculations.’”

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

Shevek said bitterly, “I’d as soon share you with him as that book.”

“Don’t look at it that way, Shev. It’s the book that’s important — the ideas. Listen. We want to keep this child to be born with us as a baby, we want to love it. But if for some reason it would die if we kept it, it could only live in a nursery, if we aever could set eyes on it or know its name — if we had that choice, which would we choose? To keep the stillborn? Or to give life?”

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

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

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

Early in the year 164 the first, incomplete, drastically edited version of the Principles of Simultaneity was printed in Abbenay, with Sabul and Shevek as joint authors. PDC was printing only essential records and directives, but Sabul had influence at the Press and in the Information division of PDC, and had persuaded them of the propaganda value of the book abroad. Unas, he said, was rejoicing over the drought and possible famine on Anarres; the last shipment of Ioti journals was full of gloating prophecies of the imminent collapse of the Odonian economy. What better denial, said Sabul, than the publication of a major work of pure thought, “a monument of science,” he said in his revised critique, “soaring above material adversity to prove the unquenchable vitality of the Odonian Society and its triumph over archist propertarian-ism in every area of human thought.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He could not look on such work without trying to help in it. He could serve as handhold and brace when she needed leverage. They found this arrangement very quickly by trial and error, and kept to it after the midwife bad come in. Takver gave birth afoot, squatting, her face against Shevek’s thigh, her hands gripping his braced arms. “There you are,” the midwife said quietly under th hard, engine-like pounding of Takver’s breathing, and she took the slimy but recognizably human creature that had appeared. A gush of blood followed, and an amorphous mass of something not human, not alive. The terror he had forgotten came back into Shevek redoubled. It was death he saw. Takver had let go his arms and was huddled down quite limp at his feet. He bent over her, stiff with horror and grief.

“That’s it,” said the midwife, “help her move aside so I can clean this up.”

“I want to wash,” Takver said feebly.

“Here, help her wash up. Those are sterile cloths — there.”

“Waw, waw, waw,” said another voice.

The room seemed to be full of people.

“Now then,” the midwife said. “Here, get that baby back with her, at the breast, to help shut off the bloodflow. I want to get this placenta to the freezer in the clinic. I’ll be ten minutes.”

“Where is— Where is the—”

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

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

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

Shevek was sitting beside her on the edge of the bed platform. He carefully investigated, somewhat taken aback by the length of gown as contrasted with the extreme shortness of limb, “Girl.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the year 164 many people who had never sought it got a taste of that kind of freedom, and liked it, liked the sense of lest and danger. The drought that began in the summer of 163 met no relief in winter. By the summer of 164 there was hardship, and the threat of disaster if the drought went on.

Rationing was strict; labor drafts were imperative. The struggle to grow enough food and to get the food distributed became convulsive, desperate. Yet people were not desperate at all Odo wrote: “A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well — this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.” There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work fcowever hard the work, a readiness to drop all care as soon as what could be done had been done. The old tag of “solidarity” had come alive again. There is exhilaration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, than all that tries the bond.

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

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

He had been expecting an emergency posting, since his construction job was finished and he had listed himself as available in the general labor pool. All summer he had done nothing but teach his courses, read, go out on whatever volunteer calls came up in their block and in the city, and come home to Takver and the baby. Takver had gone back to her laboratory, mornings only, after five decads. As a nursing mother she was entitled to both protein and carbohydrate supplements at meals, and she always availed herself of both; their friends could not share extra food with her any more, there was no extra food. She was thin but flourishing, and the baby was small but solid.

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

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

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

“Who did you think it was?”

“By damn, what a kid you were then!”

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

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

“Or at least accept them with resignation,” said Shevek.

“Shev is on a resignation binge,” Takver said. “Ifs old age coming on. It must be terrible to be thirty.”

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

The five- and six-letter names issued by the central registry computer, being unique to each living individual, took the place of the numbers which a computer-using society must otherwise attach to its members. An Anarresti needed no identification but his name. The name, therefore, was felt to be an important part of the self, though one no more chose it than one’s nose or height. Takver disliked the name the baby had got, Sadik. “It still sounds like a mouthful of gravel,” she said, “it doesn’t fit her.”

“I like it,” Shevek said. “It sounds like a tall, slender girl with long black hair.”

“But it is a short, fat girl with invisible hair,” Bedap observed.

“Give her time, brother! Listen. I’m going to make a speech.”

“Speech! Speech!”

“Shh—”

“Why shh? That baby would sleep through a cataclysm.”

“Be quiet. I feel emotional.” Shevek raised his cup of fruit juice. “I want to say — What I want to say is this. I’m glad Sadik was born now. In a hard year, in a hard time, when we need our brotherhood. I’m glad she was born now, and here. I’m glad she’s one of us, an Odonian, our daughter and our sister. I’m glad she’s sister to Bedap. That she’s sister to Sabul, even to Sabvil! I drink to this hope: that as long as she lives, Sadik will love her sisters’ and brothers as well, as joyfully, as I do now tonight. And that the rain will fall…”

PDC, the principal users of radio, telephone, and mails, coordinated the means of long-distance communication, just as they did the means of long-distance travel and shipping. There being no “business” on Anarres, in the sense of promoting, advertising, investing, speculating, and so forth, the mail consisted mostly of correspondence among industrial and professional syndicates, their directives and newsletters plus those of the PDC, and a smalt volume of personal letters. Living in a society where anyone could move whenever and wherever he wanted, an Anarresti tended to look for his friends where he was, not where he had been. Telephones were seldom used within a community; communities weren’t all that big. Even Abbenay kept up the close regional pattern in its “blocks,” the semiautonomous neighborhoods in which you could get to anyone or anything you needed, on foot. Telephone calls thus were mostly long-distance, and were handled by the PDC: personal calls had to be arranged beforehand by mail, or were not conversations but simply messages left at the PDC center. Letters went unsealed, not by law, of course, but by convention. Personal communication at long distance is costly in materials and’ labor, and since the private and the public economy was the same, there was considerable feeling against unnecessary writing or calling. It was a trivial habit; it smacked of privatism, of egoizing. This was probably why the letters went unsealed: you had no right to ask people to carry a message that they couldn’t read. A letter went on a PDC mail dirigible if you were lucky, and on a produce train if you weren’t. Eventually it got to the mail depot in the town addressed, and there it lay, there being no postmen, until somebody told the addressee that he had a letter and he came to get it.

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

The trip was not bad, three days, a passenger track truck clear through. This is a big levy — three thousand people, they say. The effects of the drought are much worse here. Not the shortages. The food in commons is the same ration as in Abbenay, only here you get boiled gara-greens at both meals every day because they have a local surplus. We too begin to feel we have had a surplus. But it is the climate here that makes misery. This is the Dust. The air is dry and the wind always blowing. There ate brief rains, but within an hour after rain the ground loosens and the dusts begins to rise. It has rained less than half the annual average this season here. Everyone on the Project gets cracked lips, nosebleed, eye irritations, and coughs. Among the people who live in Red Springs there is a lot of the dust cough. Babies have a specially hard time, you see many with skin and eyes inflamed. I wonder if I would have noticed that half a year ago. One becomes keener with parenthood. The work is just work and everyone is comradely, but the dry wind wears. Last night I thought of the Ne Theras and in the night the sound of the wind was like the sound of the stream. I will not regret this separation. It has allowed me to see that I had begun to give less, as if I possessed you and you me and there was nothing more to be done. The real fact has nothing to do with ownership. What we do is assert the wholeness of Time. Tell me what Sadik does. I am teaching a class on the free days to some people who asked for it, one girl is a natural mathematician whom I shall recommend to the Institute. Your brother,

Takver wrote to him:

I am worried by a rather queer thing. The lectures for 3d Quarter were posted three days ago and I went to find out what schedule you would have at the Inst. but no class or room was listed for you. I thought they had left you off by mistake so weat to the Members Synd. and they said yes they wanted you to give the Geom. class. So I went to the Inst. Coord, office that old woman with the nose and she knew nothing, no no I don’t know anything, go to Central Posting! That is nonsense I said and went to Sabul. But he was not in the Phys. offices and I have not seen him yet though I have been back twice. With Sadik who wears a wonderful white hat Terrus knitted her out of unraveled yarn and looks tremendously fetching. I refuse to go hunt out Sabul in the room or worm-tunnel or wherever he lives. Maybe he is off doing volunteer work ha! ha! Perhaps you should telephone the Institute and find out what sort of mistake they have made? In fact I did go down and check at Divlab Central Posting but there wasn’t any new listing for you. People there were all right but that old woman with the nose is inefficient and not helpful, and nobody takes an interest. Bedap is right we have let bureaucracy creep up on us. Please come back (with mathematical genius girl if necessary), separation is educational all right but your presence is the education I want. I am getting a half liter fruit juice plus calcium allotment a day because my milk was running short and S. yelled a lot Good old doctors!! All, always, T.

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

It was about twenty-five hundred miles from Red Springs to Abbenay, An individual on the move would have simply hitchhiked, all transport vehicles being available as passenger vehicles for as many people as they would hold; but since four hundred and fifty people were being re distributed to their regular postings in Northwest, a train was provided for them. It was made up of passenger cars, or at least of cars being used at the moment for passengers. The least popular was the boxcar that had recently carried a shipment of smoked fish.

After a year of the drought the normal transport lines were insufficient, despite the fierce efforts of the transport workers to meet demands. They were the largest federative in the Odonian society: serf-organized, of course, in regional syndicates coordinated by representatives who met and worked with the local and central PDC. The network maintained by the transport federative was effective in normal times and in limited emergencies; it was flexible, adaptable to circumstance, and the Syndics of Transport had great team and professional pride. They called their engines and dirigibles names like Indomitable, Endurance, Eat-the-Wind; they had mottoes — We Always Get There — Nothing Is Too Much! — But now, when whole regions of the planet were threatened with immediate famine if food was not brought in from other regions, and when large emergency drafts of workers must be shifted, the demands laid on transport were too much. There were not enough vehicles; there were not enough people to run them. Everything the federative had on wings or wheels was pressed into service, and apprentices, retired workers, volunteers, and emergency draftees were helping man the trucks, the trains, the ships, the ports, the yards.

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

The little town where the train stopped had no extra food in its commons or warehouses. It was not a farm •community, but a mill town, manufacturing concrete and foamstone, built on the fortunate congruence of lime deposits and a navigable river. There were truck gardens, but it was a town dependent upon transport for food. If the four hundred and fifty people on the train ate, the one hundred and sixty local people would not. Ideally, they would all share, all half-eat or half-starve together. If there had been fifty, or even a hundred, people on the train, the community probably would have spared them at least a baking of bread. But four hundred and fifty? If they gave that many anything, they would be wiped out for days. And would the next provisions train come,1 after those days? And how much grain would be on it? They gave nothing.

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

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

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

The passengers’ resentment of the townsfolk got bitter, but it was less ominous than the behavior of the townsfolk — the way they hid behind “their” walls with “their” property, and ignored the train, never looked at it. Shevek was not the only gloomy passenger; a long conversation meandered up and down beside the stopped cars, people dropping in and out of it, arguing and agreeing, all on the same general theme that his thoughts followed. A raid on the truck gardens was seriously proposed, and bitterly debated, and might have been carried out, if the train had not hooted at last for departure.

But when at last it crawled into the station down the › line, and they got a meal — a half loaf of holum bread and a bowl of soup — their gloom gave place to elation. By the time you got to the bottom of the bowl you noticed that the soup was pretty thin, but the first taste of it, the first taste had been wonderful, worth fasting for. They all agreed on that They got back into the train laughing and joking together. They had seen each other through.

A truck-train convoy picked up the Abbenay passengers at Equator Hill and brought them the last five hundred miles. They came into the city late on a windy night of early autumn. It was getting on for midnight; the streets were empty. Wind flowed through them like a turbulent dry river. Over dim street lamps the stars flared with a bright shaken light. The dry storm of autumn and passion carried Shevek through the streets, half running, three miles to the northern quarter, alone in the dark city. He took the three steps of the porchway in one, ran down the hall, came to the door, opened it. The room was dark. Stars burned in the dark windows. “Takver!” he said, and heard the silence. Before he turned on the lamp, there in the dark, in the silence, all at once, he learned what separation was.

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

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

I could not in conscience refuse now. I went and talked to them at Divlab and also read their project sent in to Ecology at PDC, and it is true they need me because I have worked exactly on this algae-cm’ate-shrimp-kukuri cycle. I requested at Divlab that you be posted to Rolny but of course they won’t act on that until you also request it, and if this is not possible because of work at the Inst. then you won’t After all if it goes on too long I will tell them get another geneticist, and come back! Sadik is very well and can say yite for light. It will not be very long. All, for life, your sister, Takver. Oh please come if you can.

The other note was scribbled on a tiny bit of paper: “Shevek: Physics off. on yr return. Sabul.”

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

No one was to blame. That was the worst of it. Takver was needed, needed to work against hunger — hers, his, Sadik’s hunger. Society was not against them. It was for them; with them; it was them.

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

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

First thing in the morning, Bunub knocked. He met her at the door and did not stand aside to het her in. She was their neighbor down the hall, a woman of fifty, a machinist in the Air Vehicle Engine factory. Takver had always been entertained by her, but she infuriated Shevek. For one thing, she wanted their room. She had claimed it when it first came vacant, she said, but the enmity of the block housing registrar had prevented her getting it Her room did not have the corner window, the object of her undying envy. It was a double, though, and she, lived alone in it, which, given the housing shortage, was egoistic of her; but Shevek would never have wasted time on disapproving her if she had not forced him by making excuses. She explained, explained. She had a partner, a lifelong partner, “just like you two,” simper. Only where was the partner? Somehow he was always spoken of in the past tense. Meanwhile the double room was pretty well justified by the succession of men that passed through Bunub’s door, a different man every night, as if Bunub were a roaring girl of seventeen. Takver observed the procession with admiration. Bunub came and told her all about the men, and complained, complained. Her not having the corner room was only one among unnumbered grievances. She had a mind both insidious and invidious, which could find the bad in anything and take it straight to her bosom. The factory where she worked was a poisonous mass of incompetence, favoritism, and sabotage. Meetings of her syndicate were bedlams of unrighteous innuendo all directed at her. The entire social organism was dedicated to the persecution of Bunub. All this made Takver laugh, sometimes wildly, right in Bunub’s face. “Oh, Bunub, you are so funny!” she would gasp and the woman, with greying hair and a thin mouth and downcast eyes, would smile thinly, not offended, not at all, and continue her monstrous recitations. Shevek knew that Takver was right to laugh at her, but he could not do it.

“It’s terrible,” she said, slithering in past him and going straight to the table to read Takver’s letter. She picked it up; Shevek plucked it out of her hand with a calm rapidity she had not prepared for. “Perfectly terrible. Not even a decad’s notice. Just, ‘Come here! Right now!’ And they say we’re free people, we’re supposed to be free people. What a joke! Breaking up a happy partnership that way. That’s why they did it, you know. They’re against partnerships, you can see it all the time, they intentionally post partners apart. That’s what happened with me and Labeks, exactly the same thing. We’ll never get back together. Not with the whole of Divlab lined up against us. There’s the little empty crib. Poor little thing! She never ceased crying these four decads, day and night. Kept me awake for hours. It’s the shortages, of course; Takver just didn’t have enough milk. And then to send a nursing mother off to a posting hundreds of miles away like that, imagine! I don’t suppose you’ll be able to join her there, where is it they sent her to?”

“Northeast. I want to get over to breakfast, Bunub. I’m hungry.”

“Isn’t it typical how they did it while you were away.”

“Did what while I was away?”

“Sent her away — broke up the partnership.” She was reading Sabul’s note, which she had uncrumpled with care. “They know when to move inl I suppose you’ll be leaving this room now, won’t you? They won’t let you keep a double. Takver talked about coming back soon, but I could see she was just trying to keep her spirits up. Freedom, we’re supposed to be free, big joke! Pushed around from here to there—”

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

“Well. I wondered if she hadn’t been looking for a. move. It often happens after a baby comes. I thought long ago you should have given that baby to a nursery. The amount it cried. Children come between partners. Tie them down. It’s only natural, as you say, that she should have been looking for a change, and jumped at it when she got it.”

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

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

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

“Farm draft. Six decads. How have things been here?”

“Lean.”

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

“Seen Sabul?”

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

Desar nodded with genuine indifference. “Heard that. You hear about Institute reorganizing?”

“No. What’s up?”

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

“Shakedown. Cutting back to functional staff. Shipeg’s out.” Shipeg was a notoriously stupid mathematician who had always managed, by assiduous flattery of students, to get himself one student-requisitioned course each term, “Sent him off. Some regional institute.”

“He’d do less harm hoeing ground-holum,” Shevek said. Now that he was fed, it appeared to him that the drought might after all be of service to the social organism. The priorities were becoming clear again. Weaknesses, soft spots, sick spots would be scoured out, sluggish organs restored to full function, the fat would be trimmed off the body politic.

“Put in word for you, Institute meeting,” Desar said, looking up but not meeting, because he could not meet, Shevek’s eyes. As he spoke, though Shevek did not yet understand what he meant, he knew that Desar was lying. He knew it positively. Desar had not put in a word for him, but a word against him.

The reason for his moments of detesting Desar was clear to him now: a recognition, heretofore unadmitted, of the element of pure malice in Desar’s personality. That Desar also loved him and was trying to gam power over him was equally clear, and, to Shevek, equally detestable. The devious ways of possessiveness, the labyrinths of love/hate, were meaningless to him. Arrogant, intolerant, he walked right through their walls. He did not speak again to the mathematician, but finished his breakfast and went off across the quadrangle, through the bright morning of early autumn, to the physics office.

He went to the back room which everybody called “Sabul’s office,” the room where they had first met, where Sabul had given him the grammar and dictionary of Iotic. Sabul looked up warily across the desk, looked down again, busy with papers, the hardworking, abstracted scientist; then allowed awareness of Shevek’s presence to seep into his overloaded brain; then became, for him, effusive. He looked thin and aged, and when he got up he stooped more than be had used to do, a placating kind of stoop. “Bad times,” he said. “Eh? Bad times!”

“They’ll get worse,” Shevek said lightly. “How’s everything here?”

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

“Is there ever a good one?”

Sabul produced an unnatural chuckle.

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

“Nothing of interest.”

“No reviews of the Principles?”

“No.” Sabul’s tone was surly, more like himself.

“No letters?”

“No.”

“That’s odd.”

“What’s odd about it? What did you expect, a lectureship at Ieu Eun University? The Seo Oen Prize?”

“I expected reviews and replies. There’s been time.” He said this as Sabul said, “Hardly been time for reviews yet”

There was a pause.

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

“I’m a physicist, not a functions analyst,” Shevek said amiably.

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

“No. Since I was ten or twelve I’ve known what kind of work I had to do.”

“What a boy thinks he likes to do isn’t always what his society needs from him.”

“I’m thirty, as you say. Rather an old boy.”

“You’ve reached that age in an unusually sheltered, protected environment First the Northsetting Regional Institute—”

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

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

“Do you consider the work you’ve done here functional?”

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

“It doesn’t get bread into people’s mouths.”

“I just spent six decads helping to do that. When I’m called again, 111 go again. Meanwhile I stick by my trade. If there’s physics to be done, I claim the right to do it.”

“What you have to face is the fact that at this point there is no physics to be done. Not the kind you do. We’ve got to gear to practicality.” Sabul shifted in his chair. He looked sullen and uneasy. “We’ve had to release five people for reposting. I’m sorry to say that you’re one of them. There it is.”

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

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

“Since when was altruism an Odonian virtue?” Shevek said. “Well, never mind. I see what you mean.” He stood up. He could not keep seated any longer, but otherwise had himself in control, and spoke perfectly naturally. MI take it you didn’t recommend me for a teaching post eke-where.”

“What would have been the use?” said Sabul, almost melodious in self-exculpation. “No one’s taking on new teachers. Teachers and students are working side by side at famine-prevention jobs all over the planet. Of course, this crisis wont last In a year or so we’ll be looking back on it, proud of the sacrifices we made and the worfc›we did, standing by each other, share and share alike. But right now…”

Shevek stood erect, relaxed, gazing out the small, scratched window at the blank sky. There was a mighty desire in him to tell Sabul, finally, to go to hell. But it was a different and profounder impulse that found words. “Actually,” he said, “you’re probably right,” With that he nodded to Sabul and left.

He caught an omnibus downtown. He was still in a tuny, driven. He was following a pattern and wanted to come to the end of it, come to rest. He went to the Division of Labor Central Posting offices to request a posting to the community to which Takver had gone.

Divlab, with its computers and its huge task of coordination, occupied a whole square; its buildings were handsome, imposing by Anarresti standards, with fine, plain lines. Inside, Central Posting was high-ceilinged and barn-like, very full of people and activity, the walls covered with posting notices and directions as to which desk or department to go to for this business or that. As Shevek waited in one of the lines be listened to the people in front of him, a boy of sixteen and a man in his sixties. The boy was volunteering for a famine-prevention posting. He was full of noble feelings, spilling over with brotherhood, adventurousness, hope. He was delighted to be going off on his own, leaving his childhood behind. He talked a great deal, like a child, in a voice not yet used to its deeper tones. Freedom, freedom! rang in his excited talk, in every word; and the old man’s voice grumbled and rumbled through it, teasing but not threatening, mocking but not cautioning. Freedom, the ability to go somewhere and do something, freedom was what the old man praised and cherished in the young one, even while he mocked his self-importance. Shevek listened to them with pleasure. They broke the morning’s series of grotesques.

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

“It’s too far from Rolny,” he said, looking at the map, noticing in the mountains of Northeast the little isolated town where Takver had grown up. Round Valley. “Don’t they need a janitor at the marine lab? A statistician? Somebody to feed the fish?”

“I’ll check.”

The human/computer network of files in Divlab was set up with admirable efficiency. It did not take the clerk five minutes to get the desired information sorted out from the enormous, continual input and outgo of information concerning every job being done, every position wanted, every workman needed, and the priorities of each in the general economy of the world-wide society. “They just filled an emergency draft — that’s the partner, isn’t it? They got everybody they wanted, four technicians and an experienced seiner. Staff complete.”

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

“Look, brother, how long is the partner’s posting?”

“Indefinite.”

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

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

“You’ll get back together. Meanwhile—”

‹Yes. Meanwhile,” he said.

She awaited his decision.

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

The identity of the words “work” and “play” in Pravic bad, of course, a strong ethical significance. Odo had seen the danger of a rigid moralism arising from the use of the word “work” in her analogic system: the cells must work together, the optimum working of the organism, the work done by each element, and so forth. Cooperation and function, essential concepts of the Analogy, both im plied work. The proof of an experiment, twenty test tubes in a laboratory or twenty million people on the Moon, is simply, does it work? Odo had seen the moral trap. “The saint is never busy,” she had said, perhaps wistfully.

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

“Well,” Shevek said, “I just came back from a famine-prevention posting. Anything else like that need doing?”

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

“Any of them need math?”

“They’re mostly farming and skilled labor. Do you have any engineering training?”

“Not much.”

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

“All right”

“That’s down in Southwest, in the Dust, you know.”

“I’ve been in the Dust before. Besides, as you say, someday it will rain…”

She nodded, smiling, and typed onto his Divlab record: FROM Abbenay, NW Cent Inst Sd, TO Elbow, SW, wk cot phosphate mill #1: EMERG PSTG; 5-1-3-165 — indefinite.