The Dispossessed

Chapter 9

Shevek was awakened by the bells in the chapel tower pealing the Prime Harmony for morning religious service. Each note was like a blow on the back of his head. He was so sick and shaky he could not even sit up for a long time. He finally managed to shuffle into the bathroom and take a long cold bath, which relieved the headache; but his whole body continued to feel strange to him — to feel, somehow, vile. As he began to be able to think again, fragments and moments of the night before came into his mind, vivid, senseless little scenes from the party at Vea’s. He tried not to think about them, and then could think of nothing else. Everything, everything became vile. He sat down at his desk, and sat there staring, motionless, perfectly miserable, for half an hour.

He had been embarrassed often enough, and had felt himself a fool. As a young man he had suffered from the sense that others thought him strange, unlike them; in later years he had felt, having deliberately invited, the anger and contempt of many of his fellows on Anarres. But he had never really accepted their judgment. He had never been ashamed.

He did not know that this paralyzing humiliation was a chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache. Nor would the knowledge have made much difference to him. Shame — the sense of vtteness and of self-estrangement — was a revelation. He saw with a new clarity, a hideous clarity; and saw far past those incoherent memories of the end of the evening at Vea’s. It was not only poor Vea who had betrayed him. It was not only the alcohol that he had tried to vomit up; it was all the bread he had eaten on Urras.

He leaned his elbows on the desk and put his head in his hands, pressing in on the temples, the cramped position of pain; and he looked at his life in the light of shame.

On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of society.

Here oa Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-indulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.

On his first night in this room he had asked them, challenging and curious, “What are you going to do with, me?” He knew now what they had done with him. Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him. He had thought to bargain with them, a very naive anarchist’s notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself,

He saw now — in detail, item by item from the beginning — that he had made a mistake in coming to Unas; his first big mistake, and one that was likely to last him the rest of his life. Once he had seen it, once he had rehearsed all the evidences of it that he had suppressed and denied for months — and it took him a long time, sitting there motionless at his desk — until he had arrived at the ludicrous and abominable last scene with Vea, and had lived through that again too, and felt his face go hot until his ears sang: then he was done with it. Even in this postalcoholic vale of tears, he felt no guilt. That was all done, now, and what must be thought about was, what must he do now? Having locked himself in jail, how might he act as a free man?

He would not do physics for the politicians. That was1 clear, now.

If he stopped working, would they let him go home?

At this, he drew a long breath and raised his head, looking with unseeing eyes at the sunlit green landscape out the window. It was the first time he had let himself think of going home as a genuine possibility. The thought threatened to break down the gates and flood him with urgent yearning. To speak Pravic, to speak to friends, to see Takver, Pilun, Sadik, to touch the dust of Anarres…

They would not let him go. He had not paid his way. Nor could he Jet himself go; give up and run.

As he sat at the desk in the bright morning sunlight he brought his hands down against the edge of the desk deliberately and sharply, twice, three times; his face was calm and appeared thoughtful.

“Where do I go?” he said aloud.

A knock oil the door. Efor came in with a breakfast tray and the morning papers. “Come in at six usual but catching up your sleep,” he observed, setting out the tray with admirable deftness.

“I got drunk last night,” Shevek said.

“Beautiful while it lasts,” said Efor. “That be all, sir? Very well,” and he exited with the same deftness, bowing on the way to Pae, who entered as he left. ”

“Didn’t mean to barge in on your breakfast! On my way back from chapel, just thought I’d look in.”

“Sit down. Have some chocolate.” Shevek was unable to eat unless Pae made some pretense at least of eating with him, Pae took a honey roll and crumbled it about on a plate. Shevek still felt rather shaky but very hungry now, and attacked his breakfast with energy. Pae seemed to find it harder than usual to start conversation.

“You’re still getting this trash?” he asked at last in an amused tone, touching the folded newspapers Efor had set on the table.

“Efor brings them.”

“Does he?”

“I asked him to,” Shevek said, glancing at Pae, a split-second reconnoitering glance. “They broaden my comprehension of your country. I take an interest in your lower classes. Most Anarresti came from the lower classes,”

“Yes, of course,” the younger man said, looking respectful and nodding. He ate a small bite of honey roll. “I think I’d like a drop of that chocolate after all,” he said, and rang the bell on the tray. Efor appeared at the door. “Another cup,” Pae said without turning. “Well, sir, we’d looked forward to taking you about again, now the weather’s turning fine, and showing you more of the country. Even a visit abroad, perhaps. But this damned war has put an end to all such plans, I’m afraid.” Shevek looked at the headline of the topmost paper:

“There’s later news than that on the telefax,” Pae said. “We’ve liberated the capital. General Havevert will be reinstalled.”

“Then the war is over?”

“Not while Thu still holds the two eastern provinces.”

“I see. So your,army and Thu’s army will fight in Benbili. But not here?”

“No, no. It would be utter folly for them to invade us, or us them. We’ve outgrown the kind of barbarism that used to bring war into the heart of the high civilizations! The balance of power is kept by this kind of police action. However, we are officially at war. So all the tiresome old restrictions win come into effect, I’m afraid.”

“Restrictions?”

“Classification of research done in the College of Noble Science, for one thing. Nothing to it, really, just a government rubber stamp. And sometimes a delay getting a paper published, when the higher-ups think it must be dangerous because they don’t understand ill… And travel’s a bit limited, especially for you and the other non-nationals here, I’m afraid. So long as the state of war lasts, you’re not actually supposed to leave the campus, I believe, without clearance from the Chancellor. But pay no attention to that. I can get you out of here whenever you like without going through all the rigmarole.”

“You hold the keys,” Shevek said, with an ingenuous smile.

“Oh, I’m an absolute specialist in it. I love getting around rules and outwitting the authorities. Perhaps I’m a natural anarchist, eh? Where the devil is that old fool I sent for a cup?”

“He must go down to the kitchens to get one.”

“Needn’t take half the day about it. Well, I won’t wait. Don’t want to take up what’s left of your morning. By the way, did you see the latest Bulletin of the Space Research Foundation? They print Reumere’s plans for the ansible.”

“What is the ansible?”

“It’s what he’s calling an instantaneous communication device. He says if the temporaliste — that’s you, of course • — wifl just work out the time-inertia equations, the engineers — that’s him — will be able to build the damned thing, test it, and thus incidentally prove the validity of the theory, within months or weeks.”

“Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built before I have provided the cause.” He smiled again, rather less ingenuously. When Fae had shut the door behind himself, Shevek suddenly stood up. “You filthy profiteering liarl he said in Pravic, white with rage, his hands clenched to keep them from picking something up and throwing It after Pae.

Efor came in carrying a cup and saucer on a tray. He stopped short, looking apprehensive.

“It’s all right, Efor. He didn’t — He didn’t want the cup. You can take it all now.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Listen. I should like no visitors, for a while. Can you keep them out?”

“Easy sir. Anybody special?”

“Yes, him. Anybody. Say I am working.”

“He’ll be glad to hear that, air,” Efor said, his wrinkles melting with malice for an instant; then with respectful familiarity, “Nobody you don’t want get past me,” and finally with formal propriety, “Thank you, sir, and good morning.”

Food, and adrenalin, had dispelled Shevek’s paralysis. He walked up and down the room, irritable and restless. He wanted to act He had spent nearly a year now doing nothing, except being a fool. It was time he did something.

Well, what had he come here to do?

To do physics. To assert, by his talent, the rights of any citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained •while working, and to share the product with all who wanted it The rights of an Odonian and of a human being.

His benevolent and protective hosts let him work, and maintained him while working, all right The problem came on the third limb. But he himself had not got there yet. He had not done his job. He couldn’t share what he didn’t have.

He went back to the desk, sat down, and took a couple of scraps of heavily scribbled paper out of the least accessible and least useful pocket of his tight-fitting, stylish trousers. He spread these scraps out with his fingers and looked at them. It occurred to him that he was getting to be like Sabul, writing very small, in abbreviations, on shreds of paper. He knew now why Sabul did it: he was possessive and secretive. A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.

Again Shevek sat quite motionless, his head bowed, studying the two little bits of paper on which he had noted down certain essential points of the General Temporal Theory, so far as it went.

For the next three days he sat at the desk and looked at the two bits of paper.

At times he got up and walked around the room, or Wrote something down, or employed the desk computer, or asked Efor to bring him something to eat, or lay down and fell asleep. Then he went back to the desk and sat there.

On the evening of the third day he was sitting, for a change, on the marble seat by the hearth. He had sat down there on the first night he entered this room, this gracious prison cell, and generally sat there when he had visitors. He had no visitors at the moment, but he was thinking about Saio Fae.

Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind; it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument Yet its potentiality had been real, and though deformed had not been lost. Pae was a very clever physicist. Or, more exactly, he was very clever about physics. He had not done anything original, but his opportunism, his sense for where advantage lay, led him time after time to the most promising field. He had the flak for where to set to work, just as Shevek did, and Shevek respected it in him as in himself, for it is a singularly important attribute in a scientist. It was Pae who had given Shevek the book translated from the Terran, the symposium on the theories of Relativity, the ideas of which had come to occupy his mind more and more of late. Was it possible that after all he had come to Urras simply to meet Saio Pae, his enemy? That he had come seeking him, knowing that he might receive from his enemy what he could not receive from his brothers and friends, what no Anarresti could give him: knowledge of the foreign, of the alien: news.…

He forgot Pae. He thought about the book. He could not state clearly to himself what, exactly, he had found so stimulating about it. Most of the physics in it was, after all, outdated; the methods were cumbersome, and the alien attitude sometimes quite disagreeable. The Terrans had been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but the physical and should not be taken as implying the metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of course, was superficially true; and yet he had used number, the bridge between the rational and the perceived, between psyche and matter, “Number the Indisputable,” as the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality.

Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the Terran’s thought Shevek caught this combination, was constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Having explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of spacetime, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields, at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclusively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound: at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept. And his refusal had been equally correct — in the long run. Only he had lacked the tools to prove it — the Saeba variables and the theories of uifinite velocity and complex cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.

But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the urt-provable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.

In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence — the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days, and indeed these last ten years — really matter?

He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear. The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Sae-ban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.

The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight. There was no end, no end…

And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears, as if he had been looking into the sun, After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one’s life has been fulfilled.

Yet he kept looking, and going farther, with that same childish joy, until all at once he could not go any farther; he came back, and looking around through his tears saw that the room was dark and the high windows were full of stars.

The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.

After a while he got up shakily and lighted the lamp. He wandered around the room a little, touching things, the binding of a book, the shade of a lamp, glad to be back among these familiar objects, back in his own world — for at this instant the difference between this planet and that one, between Urras and Anarres, was no more significant to him than the difference between two grains of sand on the shore of the sea. There were no more abysses, no more walls. There was no more exile. He had seen the foundations of the universe, and they were solid.

He went into the bedroom, walking slowly and a little unsteadily, and dropped onto the bed without undressing. He lay there with his arms behind his head, occasionally foreseeing and planning one detail or another of the work that had to be done, absorbed in a solemn and delightful thankfulness, which merged gradually into serene reverie, and then into sleep.

He slept for ten hours. He woke up thinking of the equations that would express the concept of interval. He went to the desk and set to work on them. He had a class that afternoon, and met it; he took his dinner at the Senior Faculty commons and talked with his colleagues there about the weather, and the war, and whatever else they brought up. If they noticed any change in him he did not know it, for he was not really aware of them at all. He came back to his room and worked.

The Urrasti counted twenty hours in the day. For eight days he spent twelve to sixteen hours daily at his desk, or roaming about his room, his light eyes turned often to the windows, outside which shone the warm spring sunlight, or the stars and the tawny, waning Moon.

Coming in with the breakfast tray, Efor found him lying half-dressed on the bed, his eyes shut, talking in a foreign language. He roused him. Shevek woke with a convulsive start, got up and staggered into the other room, to the desk, which was perfectly empty; he stared at the computer, which had been cleared, and then stood there like a man who has been hit on the head and does not know it yet. Efor succeeded in getting him to He down again and said, “Fever there, sir. Call the doctor?”

“No!”

“Sure, sir?”

“No! Don’t let anybody in here. Say I am ill, Efor.”

“Then they’ll fetch the doctor sure. Can say you’re still working, sir. They like that.”

“Lock the door when you go out,” Shevek said. His nontransparent body had let him down; he was weak with exhaustion, and therefore fretful and panicky. He was afraid of Pae, of Oiie, of a police search party. Everything he had heard, read, half-understood about the Urrasti police, the secret police, came vivid and terrible into his memory, as when a man admitting his illness to himself recalls every word he ever read about cancer. He stared up at Efor in feverish distress,

“You can trust me,” the man said in his subdued, wry, quick way. He brought Shevek a glass of water and went out, and the lock of the outer door clicked behind him.

He looked after Shevek during the next two days, with a tact that owed little to his training as a servant.

“You should have been a doctor, Efor,” Shevek said, when his weakness had become a merely bodily, not unpleasant lassitude.

“What my old sow say. She never wants nobody nurse her beside me when she get the pip. She say, ‘You got the touch.’ I guess I do.”

“Did you ever work with the sick?”

“No sir. Don’t want to mix up with hospitals. Black day the day I got to the in one of them pest-holes.”

“The hospitals? What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing, sir, not them you be took to if you was worse,” Efor said with gentleness.

“What kind did you mean, then?”

“Our kind. Dirty. Like a trashman’s ass-hole,” Efor said, without violence, descriptively. “Old. Kid die in one.

There’s holes in the floor, big holes, the beams show through, see? I say, ‘How come?’ See, rats come up the holes, right in the beds. They say, ‘Old building, been a hospital six hundred years.’ Stablishment of the Divine Harmony for the Poor, its name. An ass-hole what it is.”

“It was your child that died in the hospital?”

“Yes, sir, my daughter Laia.”

“What did she die of?”

“Valve in her heart They say. She don’t grow much, Two years old when she died.”

“You have other children?”

“Not living. Three born. Hard on the old sow. But now she say, “Oh, well, don’t have to be heartbreaking over’em, just as well after all!’ Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” The sudden switch to upper-class syntax jolted Shevek; he said impatiently, “Yes! Go on talking.”

Because he had spoken spontaneously, or because he was unwell and should he humored, this time Ef or did not istiffen up. “Think of going for army medic, one time,” he said, “but they get me first. Draft. Say, ‘Orderly, you be orderly.’ So I do. Good training, orderly. Come out of the army straight into gentlemen’s service.”

“You could have been trained as a medic, in the army?” The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch. All these things occurred in Efor’s reminiscences as commonplaces or as commonplace horrors. Shevek had to exercise his imagination and summon every scrap of knowledge he had about Urras to understand them at all. And yet they were familiar to him in a way that nothing he bad yet seen here was, and he did understand.

This was the Urras he had learned about in school on Anarres. This was the world from which his ancestors had fled, preferring hunger and the desert and endless exile. This was the world that had formed Odo’s mind and had jailed her eight times for speaking it. This was the human suffering in which the ideals of his society were rooted, the ground from which they sprang.

It was not “the real Urras.” The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job. “Look tired again, sir,” Efor said. “Better rest.”

“No, I’m not tired.”

Efor observed him a moment. When Efor functioned as a servant his lined, clean-shaven face was quite expressionless; during the last hour Shevek had seen it go through extraordinary changes of harshness, humor, cynicism, and pain. At the moment its expression was sympathetic yet detached.

“Different from all that where you come from,” Efor said.

“Very different.”

“Nobody ever out of work, there.” There was a faint edge of irony, or question, in his voice. “No.”

“And nobody hungry?”

“Nobody goes hungry while another eats.”

“Ah.”

“But we have been hungry. We have starved. There was a famine, you know, eight years ago. I knew a woman then who killed her baby, because she had no milk, and there was nothing else, nothing else to give it. It is not all… all milk and honey on Anarres, Efor.”

“I don’t doubt it, sir,” Efor said with one of his curious returns to polite diction. Then he said with a grimace, drawing his lips back from his teeth, “All the same there’s none of them therel”

“Them?”

“You know, Mr. Shevek. What you said once. The owners.”

The next evening Atro called by. Pae must have been on the watch, for a few minutes after Efor admitted the old man, he came strolling in, and inquired with charming sympathy after Shevek’s indisposition. “You’ve been working much too hard these last couple of weeks, sir,” he said,

“you mustn’t wear yourself out like this.” He did not sit down, but took his leave very soon, the soul of civility. Atro went on talking about the war in Benbili, which was becoming, as he put it, “a large-scale operation.”

“Do the people in this country approve of this war?” Shevek asked, interrupting a discourse on strategy. He had been puzzled by the absence of moral judgment in the birdseed papers on this subject. They had given up their ranting excitement; their wording was often exactly the same as that of the telefax bulletins issued by the government.

“Approve? You don’t think we’d lie down and let the damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world power is at stake!”

“But I meant the people, not the government. The… the people who must fight.”

“What’s it to them? They’re used to mass conscriptions. It’s what they’re for, my dear fellow! To fight for their country. And let me tell you, there’s no better soldier on earth than the Ioti man of the ranks, once he’s broken in to taking orders. In peacetime he may spout sentimental pacifism, but the grit’s there, underneath. The common soldier has always been our greatest resource as a nation. It’s how we became the leader we are.”

“By climbing up on a pile of dead children?” Shevek said, but anger or, perhaps, an unadmitted reluctance to hurt the old man’s feelings, kept his voice muffled, and Atro” did not hear him.

“No,” Atro went on, “you’ll find the soul of the people true as steel, when the country’s threatened. A few rabble-rousers in Nio and the mill towns make a big noise between wars, but it’s grand to see how the people close ranks when the flag’s in danger. You’re unwilling to believe that, I know. The trouble with Odonianism, you know, my dear fellow, is that it’s womanish. It simply doesn’t include the virile side of life. ‘Blood and steel, battle’s brightness’ as the old poet says. It doesn’t understand courage — love of the flag.”

Shevek was silent for a minute; then he said, gently, “That may be true, in part. At least, we have no flags.”

When Atro had gone, Efor came in to take out the dinner tray. Shevek stopped him. He came up close to him, saying, “Excuse me, Efor,” and put a slip of paper down on the tray. On it he had written, “Is there a microphone in this room?”

The servant bent his head and read it, slowly, and then looked up at Shevek, a long look at short range. Then his eyes Danced for a second at the chimney of the fireplace.

“Bedroom?” Shevek inquired by the same means.

Efor shook his head, put the tray down, and followed Shevek into the bedroom. He shut the door behind him with the noiselessness of a good servant.

“Spotted that one first day, dusting,” he said with a grin that deepened the lines on his face into harsh ridges.

“Not in here?”

Efor shrugged. “Never spotted it. Could run the water in there, sir, like they do in the spy stories.”

They proceeded on into the magnificent gold and ivory temple of the shitstool. Efor turned on the taps and then looked around the walls. “No,” he said. “Don’t think so. And spy eye I could spot. Get onto them when I work for a man in Nio once. Can’t miss ’em once you get onto ’em.”

Shevek took another piece of paper out of his pocket and showed it to Efor. “Do you know where this came from?”

It was the note he had found in his coat, “Join with us your brothers.”

After a pause — he read slowly, moving his closed lips — Efor said, “I don’t know where it come from.”

Shevek was disappointed. It had occurred to him that Efor himself was in an excellent position to slip something into his “master’s” pocket.

“Know who it come from. In a manner.”

“Who? How can I get to them?”

Another pause. “Dangerous business, Mr, Shevek.” Ho turned away and increased the rush of water from the taps.

“I don’t want to involve you. If you can just tell me — tell me where to go. What I should ask for. Even one name.”

A still longer pause. Efor’s face looked pinched and hard. “I don’t—” he said, and stopped. Then he said, abruptly, and very low, “Look, Mr. Shevek, God knows they want you, we need you, but look, you don’t know what it’s like. How you going to hide? A man like you? Looking like you look? This a trap here, but it’s a trap anywhere. You can run but you can’t hide. I don’t know what to tell you. Give you names, sure. Ask any Nioti, he tell you where to go. We had about enough. We got to have some air to breathe. But you get caught, shot, how do I feel? I work for you eight months, I come to like you. To admire you. They approach me all the time. I say, “No. Let him be. A good man and he got no part of our troubles. Let him go back where he come from where the people are free. Let somebody go free from this God damned prison we living in!’”

“I cant go back. Not yet I want to meet these people.”

Efor stood silent Perhaps it was his life’s habit as a servant, as one who obeys, that made him nod at last and say, whispering, “Tuio Maedda, he who you want. In Joking Lane, in Old Town. The grocery.”

“Pae says I am forbidden to leave the campus. They can stop me if they see me take the train.”

“Taxi, maybe,” Efor said. “I call you one, you go down by the stairs. I know Kae Oimon on the stand. He got sense. But I don’t know.”

“All right. Right now. Pae was just here, he saw me, he thinks I’m staying in because I’m ill. What time is it?”

“Half past seven.”

“If I go now, I have the night to find where I should go. Call the taxi, Efor.”

“Ill pack you a bag, sir—”

“A bag of what?”

“You’ll need clothes—”

“I’m wearing clothes! Go on.”

“You cant just go with nothing,” Efor protested. This made him more anxious and uneasy than anything else. “You got money?”

“Oh — yes. I should take that”

Shevek was on the move already; Efor scratched his head, looked grim and dour, but went off to the hall phone to call the taxi He returned to find Shevek waiting outside the hall door with his coat on. “Go downstairs,” Efor said, grudgingly. “Kae be at the back door, five minutes. Tell him go out by Grove Road, no checkpoint there like at the main gate. Don’t go by the gate, they stop you there sure.”

“Will you be blamed for this, Efor?”

They were both whispering.

“I don’t know you gone. Morning, I say you don’t get up yet. Sleeping. Keep ’em off a while.”

Shevek took him by the shoulders, embraced him, shook his hand. “Thank you, Efor!”

“Good luck,” the man said, bewildered. Shevek was already gone.

Shevek’s costly day with Vea had taken most of his ready cash, and the taxi ride in to Nio took ten units more. He got out at a major subway station and by using his map worked his way by subway into Old Town, a section of the city he had never seen. Joking Lane was not on the map, so he got off the train at the central stop for Old Town. When he came up from the spacious marble station into the street he stopped in confusion. This did not look like Nio Esseia.

A fine, foggy rain was falling, and it was quite dark; there were no street lights. The lampposts were there, but the lights were not turned on, or were broken. Yellow gleams slitted from around shuttered windows here and there. Down the street, light streamed from an open doorway, around which a group of men were lounging, talking loud. The pavement, greasy with rain, was littered with scraps of paper and refuse. The shopfronts, as well as he could make them out, were low, and were all covered up with heavy metal or wooden shutters, except for one which had been gutted by fire and stood black and blank, shards of glass still sticking in the frames of the broken windows. People went by, silent hasty shadows.

An old woman was coming up the stairs behind him, and he turned to her to ask his way. In the light of the yellow globe that marked the subway entrance he saw her face clearly: white and lined, with the dead, hostile stare of weariness. Big glass earrings bobbed on her cheeks. She climbed the stairs laboriously, hunched over with fatigue or with arthritis or some deformity of the spine. But she was not old, as he had thought; she was not even thirty.

“Can you tell me where Joking Lane is,” he asked her, stammering. She glanced at him with indifference, hurried her pace as she reached the top of the stairs, and went on without a word.

He set off at random down the street The excitement of his sudden decision and flight from Ieu Eun had turned to apprehension, a sense of being driven, hunted. He avoided the group of men around the door, instinct warning him that the single stranger does not approach that kind of group. When he saw a man ahead of him walking alone, he caught up and repeated his question. The man said, MI don’t know,” and turned aside,

There was nothing to do but go on. He came to a better-lighted cross street, which wound off into the misty rain in both directions in a dim, grim garishness of lighted signs and advertisements. There were many wineshops and pawnshops, some of them still open. A good many people were in the street, jostling past, going in and out of the wineshops. There was a man lying down, lying in the gutter, his coat bunched up over his head, lying in the rain, asleep, sick, dead. Shevek stared at him with horror, and at the others who walked past without looking.

As he stood there paralyzed, somebody stopped by him and looked up into his face, a short, unshaven, wry-necked fellow of fifty or sixty, with red-rimmed eyes and a toothless mouth opened in a laugh. He stood and laughed wit-lessly at the big, terrified man, pointing a shaky hand at him. “Where you get all that hair, eh, eh, that hair, where you get all that hair,” he mumbled.

“Can — can you tell me how to get to Joking Lane?”

“Sure, joking, I’m joking, no joke I’m broke. Hey you got a little blue for a drink on a cold night? Sure you got a little blue.”

He came closer. Shevek drew away, seeing the open hand but not understanding.

“Come on, take a joke mister, one little blue,” the man mumbled without threat or pleading, mechanically, his mouth still open in the meaningless grin, his hand held out.

Shevek understood. He groped in his pocket, found the last of his money, thrust it into the beggar’s hand, and then, cold with a fear that was not fear for himself, pushed past the man, who was mumbling and trying to catch at his coat, and made for the nearest open door. It was under a sign that read “Pawn and Used Goods Best Values.” In-iside, among the racks of worn-out coats, shoes, shawls, battered instruments, broken lamps, odd dishes, canisters, spoons, beads, wrecks and fragments, every piece of rubbish marked with its price, he stood trying to collect himself.

“Looking for something?”

He put his question once more.

The shopkeeper, a dark man as tall as Shevek but stooped and very thin, looked him over. “What you want to get there for?”

“I’m looking for a person who lives there.”

“Where you from?”

“I need to get to this street, Joking Lane. Is it far from here?”

“Where you from, mister?”

“I am from Anarres, from the Moon,” Shevek said angrily. “I have to get to Joking Lane, now, tonight”

“You’re him? The scientist fellow? What the hell you doing here?”

“Getting away from the police! Do you want to tell them I’m here, or will you help me?”

“God damn,” the man said. “God damn. Look—” He hesitated, was about to say something, about to say something else, said, “You just go on,” and in the same breath though apparently with a complete change of mind, said, “All right I’m closing. Take you there. Hold on. God damn!”

He rummaged in the back of the shop, switched off the light, came outside with Shevek, pulled down metal shutters and locked them, padlocked the door, and set off at a sharp pace, saying, “Come oaf.”

They walked twenty or thirty blocks, getting deeper into the maze of crooked streets and alleys in the heart of Old Town. The misty rain fell softly in the unevenly lit darkness, bringing out smells of decay, of wet stone and metal. They turned down an unlit, unsigned alley between high old tenements, the ground floors of which were mostly shops. Shevek’s guide stopped and knocked on the shuttered window of one: V. Maedda, Fancy Groceries. After a good while the door was opened. The pawnbroker conferred with a person inside, then gestured to Shevek, and they both entered. A girl had let them in. “Tuio’s in back, come on,19 she said, looking up into Shevek’s face in the weak light from a back hallway. “Are you him?” Her voice was faint and urgent; she smiled strangely. “Are you really him?”

Tuio Maedda was a dark man in his forties, with a strained, intellectual face. He shut a book in which be had been writing and got quickly to his feet as they entered. He greeted the pawnbroker by name, but never took his eyes off Shevek.

“He come to my shop asking the way here, Tuio. He say be the, you know, the one from Anarres.”

“You are, aren’t you?” Maedda said slowly. “Shevek, What are you doing here?” He stared at Shevek with alarmed, luminous eyes.

“Looking for help.”

“Who sent you to me?”

“The first man I asked. I don’t know who you are. I asked him where I could go, he said to come to you.”

“Does anybody else know you’re here?”

They don’t know I’ve gone. Tomorrow they will.”

“Go get Remeivi,” Maedda said to the girl. “Sit down, Dr. Shevek. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

Shevek sat down on a wooden chair but did not unfasten his coat. He was so tired he was shaking. “I escaped,” he said. “From the University, from the jail. I don’t know where to go. Maybe it’s all jails here. I came here because they talk about the lower classes, the working classes, and I thought, that sounds like my people. People who might help each other.”

“What kind of help are you looking for?”

Shevek made an effort to pull himself together. He looked around the little, Uttered office, and at Maedda. “I have something they want,” he said. “An idea. A scientific theory. I came here from Anarres because I thought that here I could do the work and publish it. I didn’t understand that here an idea is a property of the State. I don’t work for a State. I cant take the money and the things they give me. I want to get out But I can’t go home. So I came here. You don’t want my science, and maybe you don’t like your government either.”

Maedda smiled. “No. I don’t. But our government don’t like me any better. You didn’t pick the safest place to come, either for you or for us… Don’t worry. Tonight’s tonight; we’ll decide what to do.”

Shevek took out the note he had found in his coat pocket and handed it to Maedda. “This is what brought me. Is it from people you know?”

“Join with us your brothers… I don’t know. Could be.”

“Are you Odonians?”

“Partly. Syndicalists, libertarians. We work with the Thuvianists, the Socialist Workers Union, but we’re anti-centralist. You arrived at a pretty hot moment, you know.”

“The war?”

Maedda nodded. “A demonstration’s been announced for three days from now. against the draft, war taxes, the rise in food prices. There’s four hundred thousand unemployed in Nio Esseia, and they jack up taxes and prices.” He had been watching Shevek steadily all the time they talked; now, as if the examination was done, he looked away, leaning back in his chair. “This city’s about ready for anything. A strike is what we need, a general strike, and massive demonstrations. Like the Ninth Month Strike that Odo led,” he added with a dry, strained smile. “We could use an Odo now. But they’ve got no Moon to buy us off with this time. We make justice here, or nowhere.” He looked back at Shevek, and presently said in a softer voice, “Do you know what your society has meant, here, to us, these last hundred and fifty years? Do you know that when people here want to wish each other luck they say, ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’ To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation, that they can never say again that it’s just a mirage, an idealist’s dream! I wonder if you fully understand why theyVe kept you so well hidden out there at Ieu Eun, Dr. Shevek. Why you never were allowed to appear at any meeting open to the public. Why they’ll be after you like dogs after a rabbit the moment they find you’re gone. It’s not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh, Walking amongst us.”

“Then you’ve got your Odo,” the girl said in her quiet, urgent voice. She had re-entered as Maedda was speaking. “After all, Odo was only an idea. Dr. Shevek is the proof.”

Maedda was silent for a minute. “An undemonstrable proof,” he said.

“Why?”

“If people know he’s here, the police will know it too.”

“Let them come and try to take him,” the girl said, and smiled.

“The demonstration is going to be absolutely nonviolent,” Maedda said with sudden violence. “Even the SWU have accepted that!”

“I haven’t accepted it, Tuio. I’m not going to let my face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the black-coats. If they hurt me, 111 hurt back.”

“Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not achieved by force!”

“And power isn’t achieved by passivity.”

“We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! What do you say?” Maedda appealed to Shevek. “The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!”

Shevek looked at him, at the girl, and at the pawnbroker who stood listening tensely near the door. He said in a tired, quiet voice, “If I would be of use, use me. Maybe I could publish a statement on this in one of your papers. I did not come to Urtas to hide. If all the people know I am here, maybe the government would be afraid to arrest me in public? I don’t know.”

“That’s it,” Maedda said. “Of course.” His dark eyes blazed with excitement. “Where the devil is Remeivi? Go call his sister, Siro, tell her to hunt him out and get him over here. — Write why you came here, write about Anar-res, write why you won’t sell yourself to the government, write what you like — we’ll get it printed. Siro! Call Meisthe too, — We’ll hide you, but fay God well let ever man in A-Io know you’re here, you’re with us!” The words poured out of him, his hands jerked as he spoke, and he walked quickly back and forth across the room, “And then, after the demonstration, after the strike, we’ll see. Maybe things will be different then! Maybe you won’t have to hide!”

“Maybe all the prison doors will fly open,” Shevek said. “Well, give me some paper, I’ll write.”

The girl Siro came up to him. Smiling, she stooped as if bowing to him, a little timorously, with decorum, and kissed him on the cheek; then she went out. The touch of her lips was cool, and he felt it on his cheek for a long time.

He spent one day in the attic of a tenement in Joking Lane, and two nights and a day in a basement under a used-furniture store, a strange dim place full of empty mirror frames and broken bedsteads. He wrote. They brought him what he had written, printed, within a few hours; at first in the newspaper Modern Age, and later, after the Modern Age presses had been closed down and the editors arrested, as handbills run on a clandestine press, along with plans and incitations for the demonstration and general strike. He did not read over what he had written. He did not listen closely to Maedda and the others, who described the enthusiasm with which the papers were read, the spreading acceptance of the plan for the strike, the effect his presence at the demonstration would make in the eyes of the world. When they left him alone, sometimes he took a small notebook from his shirt pocket and looked at the coded notes and equations of the General Temporal Theory. He looked at them and could not read them. He did not understand them. He put the notebook away again and sat with his head between his hands.

Anarres had no flag to wave, but among the placards proclaiming the general strike, and the blue and white banners of the Syndicalists and the Socialist Workers, there were many homemade signs showing the green Circle of Life, the old symbol of the Odonian Movement of two hundred years before. All the flags and signs shone bravely in the sunlight.

It was good to be outside, after the rooms with locked doors, the hiding places. It was good to be walking, swinging his arms, breathing the clear air of a spring morning. To be among so many people, so immense a crowd, thousands marching together, filling all the side streets as well as the broad thoroughfare down which they marched, was frightening, but it was exhilarating too. When they sang, both the exhilaration and the fear became a blind exaltation; he eyes filled with tears. It was deep, in the deep streets, softened by open air and by distances, indistinct, overwhelming, that lifting up of thousands of voices in one song. The singing of the front of the march, far away up the street, and of the endless crowds coming on behind, was put out of phase by the distance the sound must travel, so that the melody seemed always to be lagging and catching up with itself, like a canon, and all the parts of the song were being sung at one time, in the same moment, though each singer sang the tune as a line from beginning to end.

He did not know their songs, and only listened and was borne along on the music, until from up front there came sweeping back wave by wave down the great slow-moving river of people a tune he knew. He lifted his head and sang it with them, in his own language as he had learned it: the Hymn of the Insurrection. It had been sung in these streets, in this same street, two hundred years ago, by these people, his people.

O eastern light, awaken Those who have slept! The darkness will be broken, The promise kept.

They fell silent in the ranks around Shevek to hear him, and he sang aloud, smiling, walking forward with them.

There might have been a hundred thousand human beings in Capitol Square, or twice that many. The individuals, like the particles of atomic physics, could not be counted, nor their positions ascertained, nor their behavior predicted. And yet, as a mass, that enormous mass did what it had been expected to do by the organizers of the strike: it gathered, marched in order, sang, filled Capitol Square and all the streets around, stood in its numberlessness restless yet patient in the bright noon listening to the speakers, whose single voices, erratically amplified, clapped and echoed off the sunlit facades of the Senate and the Directorate, rattled and hissed over the continuous, soft, vast murmur of the crowd itself.

There were more people standing here in the Square than lived in all Abbenay, Shevek thought, but the thought was meaningless, an attempt to quantify direct experience. He stood with Maedda and the others on the steps of the Directorate, in front of the columns and the tall bronze doors, and looked out over the tremulous, somber field of faces, and listened as they listened to the speakers: not hearing and understanding in the sense in which the individual rational mind perceives and understands, but rather as one looks at, listens to one’s own thoughts, or as a thought perceives and understands the self. When he spoke, speaking was little different from listening. No conscious will of his own moved him, no self-consciousness was in him. The multiple echoes of his voice from distant loudspeakers and the stone fronts of the massive buildings, however, distracted him a little, making him hesitate at times and speak very slowly. But he never hesitated for words. He spoke their mind, their being, in their language, though he said no more than he had said out of his own isolation, out of the center of his own being, a long time ago.

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

“I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise that we made two hundred years ago in this city — the promise kept. We have kept it, on Anarres. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into his future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

As he finished speaking the clattering racket of police helicopters drawing near began to drown out his voice.

He stood back from the microphones and looked upward, squinting into the sun. As many of the crowd did so the movement of their heads and hands was like the passage of wind over a sunlit field of grain.

The noise of the rotating vanes of the machines in the huge stone box of Capitol Square was intolerable, a clacking and yapping like the voice of a monstrous robot. It drowned out the chatter of the machine guns fired from the helicopters. Even as the crowd noise rose up in tumult the clack of the helicopters was still audible through it, the mindless yell of weaponry, the meaningless word.

The helicopter fire centered on the people who stood on or nearest the steps of the Directorate. The columned portico of the building offered immediate refuge to those on the steps, and within moments it was jammed solid. The noise of the crowd, as people pressed in panic toward the eight streets that led out of Capitol Square, rose up into a wailing like a great wind. The helicopters were close overhead, but there was no telling whether they had ceased firing or were still firing; the dead and wounded in the crowd were too close pressed to fall.

The bronze-sheathed doors of the Directorate gave with a crash that no one heard. People pressed and trampled toward them to get to shelter, out from under the metal rain. They pushed by hundreds into the high halls of marble, some cowering down to hide in the first refuge they saw, others pushing on to find a way through the building and out the back, others staying to wreck what they could until the soldiers came. When they came, marching in their neat black coats up the steps among dead and dying men and women, they found on the high, grey, polished wall of the great foyer a word written at the height of a man’s eyes, in broad smears of blood: DOWN.

They shot the dead man who lay nearest the word, and later on when the Directorate was restored to order the word was washed off the wall with water, soap, and rags, but it remained; it had been spoken; it had meaning.

He realized it was impossible to go any farther with his companion, who was getting weak, beginning to stumble. There was nowhere to go, except away from Capitol Square. There was nowhere to stop, either. The crowd had twice rallied in Mesee Boulevard, trying to present a front to the police, but the army’s armored cars came behind, the police and drove the people forward, towards Old Town. The blackcoats had not fired either time, though the noise of guns could be heard on other streets. The clacking helicopters cruised up and down above the streets; one› could not get out from under them.

His companion was breathing in sobs, gulping for air as! he struggled along. Shevek had been half-carrying him for several blocks, and they were now far behind the main, mass of the crowd. There was no use trying to catch up. “Here, sit down here,” he told the man, and helped him toi sit down on the top step of a basement entry to some kind of warehouse, across the shuttered windows of which the word STRIKE was chalked in huge letters. He went down, to the basement door and tried it; it was locked. All doors, were locked. Property was private. He took a piece of paving stone that had come loose from a corner of the steps and smashed the hasp and padlock off the door; working neither furtively nor vindictively, but with the assurance of one unlocking his own front door. He looked in. The basement was full of crates and empty of people. Ha helped his companion down the steps, shut the door behind them, and said, “Sit here, lie down if you want I’ll see if there’s water.”

The place, evidently a chemical warehouse, had a row of washtubs as well as a hose system for fires. Shevek’s companion had fainted by the time he got back to him. He took the opportunity to wash the man’s hand with a trickle from the hose and to get a look at his wound. It was worse than he had thought More then one bullet must have struck it, tearing two fingers off and mangling the palm and wrist. Shards of splintered bone stuck out like toothpicks. The man had been standing near Shevek and Maedda when the helicopters began firing and, hit, had lurched against Shevek, grabbing at him for support.

Shevek had kept an arm around him all through the escape through the Directorate; two could keep afoot better than one in the first wild press.

He did what he could to stop the bleeding with a tourniquet and to bandage, or at least cover, the destroyed hand, and he got the man to drink some water. He did not know his name; by his white armband he was a Socialist Worker; he looked to be about Shevek’s age, forty, or a little older.

At the milk in Southwest Shevek had seen men hurt much worse than this in accidents and had learned that people may endure and survive incredibly much in the way of gross injury and pain. But there they had been. looked after. There had been a surgeon to amputate, plasma to compensate blood loss, a bed to lie down in.

He sat down on the floor beside the man, who now lay semiconscious in shock, and looked around at the stacks of crates, the long dark alleys between them, the whitish gleam of daylight from the barred window slits along the front wall, the white streaks of saltpeter on the ceiling, the tracks of workmen’s boots and dolly wheels on the dusty cement floor. One hour hundreds of thousands of people singing under the open sky; the next hour two men’ hiding in a basement.

“You are contemptible,” Shevek said in Pravic to his companion. “You cannot keep doors open. You will never be free.” He felt the man’s forehead gently; it was cold and sweaty. He loosened the tourniquet for a while, then got up, crossed the murky basement to the door, and went up onto the street. The fleet of armored cars had passed. A very few stragglers of the demonstration went by, hurrying, their heads down, in enemy territory. Shevek tried to stop two; a third finally halted for him. “I need a doctor, there is a man hurt Can you send a doctor back here?”

“Better get him out.”

“Help me carry him.”

The man hurried on. “They coming through here,” he called back over his shoulder. “You better get out.”

No one else came by, and presently Shevek saw a line of blackcoats far down the street He went back down into the basement, shut tbe door, returned to the wounded man’s side, sat down on the dusty floor. “Hell,” he said.

After a while he took the little notebook out of his shirt pocket and began to study it.

In the afternoon, when be cautiously looked outside, he saw an armored car stationed across the street and two others slewed across the street at the crossing. That explained the shouts he had been hearing: it would be soldiers giving orders to each other.

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains… and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust “You call that organization?” he had inquired. “You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency — a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?” This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. “But that only works when the people think they’re fighting for something of their own — you know, their homes, or some notion or other,” the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men, with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he Still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.

He occasionally spoke to his companion, too, as it got darker. The man was lying now with his eyes open, and he moaned a couple of times in a way that touched Shevek, a childish, patient sort of moan. He had made a gallant effort to keep up and keep going, all the time they were In the first panic of the crowd forcing into and through the Directorate, and running, and then walking towards Old Town; he had held the hurt hand under his coat, pressed against his side, and had done his best to keep going and not to hold Shevek back. The second time he moaned, Shevek took his good hand and whispered, “Don’t, don’t. Be quiet, brother,” only because he could not bear to hear the man’s pain and not be able to do anything for him. The man probably thought he meant he should be quiet lest be give them away to the police, for he nodded weakly and shut his lips together.

The two of them endured there three nights. During all that time there was sporadic fighting in the warehouse district, and the army blockade remained across that block of Mesee Boulevard. The fighting never came very close to it, and it was strongly manned, so the men in hiding had no chance to get out without surrendering themselves. Once when his companion was awake Shevek asked him, “’If we went out to the police what would they do with us?”

The man smiled and whispered, “Shoot us.”

As there had been scattered gunfire around, near and far, for hours, and an occasional solid explosion, and the clacking of the helicopters, his opinion seemed well founded. The reason for his smile was less clear.

He died of loss of blood that night, while they lay side by side for warmth on the mattress Shevek had made from packing-crate straw. He was already stiff when Shevek woke, and sat up, and listened to the silence in the great dark basement and outside on the street and in all the city, a silence of death.