The Dispossessed

Chapter 12

“I want to introduce a project,” said Bedap, “from the Syndicate of Initiative. You know that we’ve been in radio contact with Unas for about twenty decads—”

“against the recommendation of this council, and the Defense Federative, and a majority vote of the List!”

“Yes,” Bedap said, looking the speaker up and down, but not protesting the interruption. There were no rules of parliamentary procedure at meetings in PDC. Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place — inside a living animal.

Bedap knew all his old opponents on the Import-Export Council; he had been coming and fighting them for three years now. This speaker was a new one, a young man, probably a new lottery posting to the PDC List Bedap looked him over benevolently and went on, “Let’s not re-fight old quarrels, shall we? I propose a new one. We’ve received an interesting message from a group on Urras. It came on the wave length our Ioti contacts use, but it didn’t come at a scheduled time, and was a weak signal. It seems to have been sent from a country called Benbili, not from A-Io. The group called themselves The Odonian Society.” It appears that they’re post-Settlement Odonians, existing in some fashion in the loopholes of law and government on Urras. Their message was to’the brothers on Anarres.’ You can read it in the Syndicate bulletin, it’s interesting. They ask if they might be allowed to send people here.”

“Send people here? Let Urrasti come here? Spies?”

“No, as settlers.”

“They want the Settlement reopened, is that it, Bedap?”

“They say they’re being hounded by their government, and are hoping for—”

“Reopen the Settlement! To any profiteer who calls himself an Odonian?”

To report an Anarresti managerial debate in full would be difficult; it went very fast, several people often speaking at once, nobody speaking at great length, a good deal of sarcasm, a great deal left unsaid; the tone emotional, often fiercely personal; an end was reached, yet there was no conclusion. It was like an argument among brothers, or among thoughts in an undecided mind.

“If we let these so-called Odonians come, how do they propose to get here?”

There spoke the opponent Bedap dreaded, the cool, intelligent woman named Rulag. She had been his cleverest enemy all year in the council. He glanced at Shevek, who was attending this council for the first time, to draw his attention to her. Somebody had told Bedap that Rulag was an engineer, and he had found in her the engineer’s clarity and pragmatism of mind, plus the mechanist’s hatred of complexity and irregularity. She opposed the Syndicate of Initiative on every issue, including that of its right to exist. Her arguments were good, and Bedap respected her. Sometimes when she spoke of the strength of Urras, and the danger of bargaining with the strong from a position of weakness, he believed her.

For there were times when Bedap wondered, privately, whether he and Shevek, when they got together in the winter of ’68 and discussed the means by which a frustrated physicist might print his work and communicate it to physicists on Urras, had not set off an uncontrollable chain of events. When they had finally set up radio contact, the Urrasti had been more eager to talk, to exchange information, than they had expected; and when they had printed reports of those exchanges, the opposition on Anarres had been more virulent than they had expected. People on both worlds were paying more attention to them than was really comfortable. When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder ft you are, in fact, a traitor.

“I suppose they’d come on one of the freighters,” he replied. “Like good Odonians, they’d hitchhike. If their government, or the Council of World Governments, let them. Would they let them? Would the archists do the anarchists a favor? That’s what I’d like to find out. If we invited a small group, six or eight of these people, what would happen at that end?”

“Laudable curiosity,” Rulag said. “We’d know the danger better, all right, if we knew better how things really work on Urras. But the danger lies in the act of finding out.” She stood up, signifying that she wanted to hold the floor for more than a sentence or two. Bedap winced, and glanced again at Shevek, who sat beside him. “Look out for this one,” he muttered. Shevek made no response, but he was usually reserved and shy at meetings, no good at all unless he got moved deeply by something, in which case he was a surprisingly good speaker. He sat looking down at his hands. But as Rulag spoke, Bedap noticed that though she was addressing him, she kept glancing at Shevek.

“Your Syndicate of Initiative,” she said, emphasizing the pronoun, “has proceeded with building a transmitter, with broadcasting to Urras and receiving from them, and with publishing the communications. You’ve done all this against the advice of the majority of the PDC, and increasing protests from the entire Brotherhood. There have been no reprisals against your equipment or yourselves yet, largely, I believe, because we Odonians have become unused to the very idea of anyone’s adopting a course harmful to others and persisting in it against advice and protest. It’s a rare event In fact, you are the first of us who have behaved in the way that archist critics always predicted people would behave in a society without laws: with total irresponsibility towards the society’s welfare. I don’t propose to go again into the harm you’ve al ready done, and handing out of scientific information to a powerful enemy, the confession of our weakness that each of your broadcasts to Unas represents. But now, thinking that we’ve got used to all that, you’re proposing something very much worse. What’s the difference, you’ll say, between talking to a few Urrasti on the shortwave and talking to a few of them here in Abbenay? What’s the difference? What’s the difference between a shut door and an open one? Let’s open the door — that’s what he’s saying, you know, ammari. Let’s open the door, let the Urrasti come! Six or eight pseudo-Odonians on the next freighter. Sixty or eighty Ioti profiteers on the one after, to look us over and see how we can be divided up as a property among the nations of Urras. And the next trip will be six or eight hundred armed ships of war: guns, soldiers, an occupying force. The end of Anarres, the end of the Promise. Our hope lies, it has lain for a hundred and seventy years, in the Terms of the Settlement: No Urrasti off the ships, except the Settlers, then, or ever. No mixing. No contact To abandon that principle now is to say to the tyrants whom we defeated once, The experiment has failed, come re-enslave usl”

“Not at all,” Bedap said promptly. “The message is clear: The experiment has succeeded, we’re strong enough now to face you as equals.”

The argument proceeded as before, a rapid hammering of issues. It did not last long. No vote was taken, as usual. Almost everyone present was strongly for sticking to the Terms of the Settlement, and as soon as this became clear Bedap said, “All right, 111 take that as settled. Nobody comes in on the Kuieo Fort or the Mindful. In the matter of bringing Urrasti to Anarres, the Syndicate’s aims clearly must yield to the opinion of the society as a whole; we asked your advice, and we’ll follow it. But there’s another aspect of the same question. Shevek?”

“Well, there’s the question,” Shevek said, “Of sending an Anarresti to Urras.”

There were exclamations and queries. Shevek did not raise his voice, which was not far above a mumble, but persisted. “It wouldn’t harm or threaten anyone living on Anarres. And it appears that it’s a matter of the individual’s right; a kind of test of it, in fact The Terms of the Settlement don’t forbid it. To forbid it now would be an assumption of authority by the PDC, an abridgment of the right of the Odonian individual to initiate action harmless to others.”

Rulag sat forward. She was smiling a little. “Anyone can leave Anarres,” she said. Her light eyes glanced from Shevek to Bedap and back. “He can go whenever he likes, if the propertarians’ freighters will take him. He can’t come back.”

“Who says he can’t?” Bedap demanded,

“The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement. Nobody win be allowed off the freight ships farther than the boundary of the Port of Anarres.”

“Well, now, that was surely meant to apply to Urrasti, not Anarresti,” said an old adviser, Ferdaz, who liked to stick his oar in even when it steered the boat off the course he wanted.

“A person coming from Unas is an Urrasti,” said Rulag.

“Legalisms, legalisms! What’s all this quibbling?” said a calm, heavy woman named Trepil.

“Quibbling!” cried the new member, the young man. He had a Northrising accent and a deep, strong voice. “If you don’t like quibbling, try this. If there are people here that don’t like Anarres, let ’em go. in help, in carry ’em to the Port, 111 even kick ’em there! But if they try to come sneaking back, there’s going to be some of us there to meet them. Some real Odonians. And they won’t find us smiling and saying, “Welcome home, brothers.” They’ll find their teeth knocked down their throats and their balls kicked up into their bellies. Do you understand that? Is it clear enough for you?”

“Clear, no; plain, yes. Plain as a fart,” said Bedap. “Clarity is a function of thought You should learn some Odonianism before you speak here.”

“You’re not worthy to say the name of Odo!” the young man shouted. “You’re traitors, you and the whole Syndicate! There are people all over Anarres watching you. You think we don’t know that Shevek’s been asked to go to Urras, to go sell Anarresti science to the profiteers? You think we don’t know that all you snivelers would love to go there and live rich and let the propertarians pat you on the back? You can got Good riddance! But if you try coming back here, you’ll meet with justice!”

He was on his feet and leaning across the table, shouting straight into Bedap’s face. Bedap looked up at him •and said, “You don’t mean justice, you mean punishment. Do you think they’re the same thing?”

“He means violence,” Rulag said. “And if there is violence, you will have caused it You and your Syndicate. And you will have deserved it.”

A thin, small, middle-aged man beside Trepil began speaking, at first so softly, in a voice hoarsened by the dust cough, that few of them heard him. He was a visiting delegate from a Southwest miners’ syndicate, not expected to speak on this matter. “… what men deserve,” he was baying. “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the Virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” They were, of course, Odo’s words from the Prison Letters, but spoken in the weak, hoarse voice they made a strange effect, as if the man were working them out word by word himself, as if they came from his own heart, slowly, with difficulty, as the water wells up slowly, slowly, from the desert sand.

Rulag listened, her head erect, her face set, like that of a person repressing pain. Across the table from her Shevek sat with his head bowed. The words left a silence after them, and he looked up and spoke into it.

“You see,” be said, “what we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the ride of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is far all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’ We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.”

Rulag replied, as quietly as he, but very coldly, “you have no right to involve us all in a risk that private motives compel you to take.”

“No one who will not go as far as I’m willing to go has any right to stop me from going,” Shevek answered. Their eyes met for a second; both looked down.

“The risk of a trip to Urras involves nobody but the person going,” Bedap said. “It changes nothing in the Terms of the Settlement, and nothing in our relationship with Urras, except, perhaps, morally — to our advantage. But I don’t think we’re ready, any of us, to decide on it 1’H withdraw tide topic for the present, if it’s agreeable to the rest of you.”

They assented, and he and Shevek left the meeting.

“I’ve got to go over to the Institute,” Shevek said as they came out of the PDC building. “Sabul sent me one of his toenail clippings — first in years. What’s on his mind, I wonder?”

“What’s on that woman Rulag’s mind, I wonder! She’s got a personal grudge against you. Envy, I suppose. We won’t put you two across a table again, or we’ll get nowhere. Though that young fellow from Northrising was bad news, too. Majority rule and might makes right! Are we going to get our message across, Shev? Or are we only hardening the opposition to it?”

“We may really have to send somebody off to Urras — prove our right to by acts, if words won’t do it.”

“Maybe. So long as it isn’t me! I’ll talk myself purple about our right to leave Anarres, but if I had to do it, by damn, I’d slit my throat”

Shevek laughed. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be home in an hour or so. Come eat with us tonight.”

“Ill meet you at the room.”

Shevek set off down the street with his long stride; Bedap stood hesitating in front of the PDC building. It was midafternoon, a windy, sunny, cold spring day. The streets of Abbenay were bright, scoured-looking, alive with light and people. Bedap felt both excited and let down. Everything, including his emotions, was promising yet unsatisfactory. He went off to the domicile in the Pekesh Block where Shevek and Takver now lived, and found, as he had hoped, Takver at home with the baby.

Takver had miscarried twice and then Pilun had come along, late and a little unexpected, but very welcome. She had been small at birth and now, getting on to two, was still small, with thin arms and legs. When Bedap held her he was always vaguely frightened of or repelled by the feeling of those arms, so fragile that he could have broken them simply with a twist of his hand. He was very fond of Pilun, fascinated by her cloudy grey eyes and won by her utter trustfulness, but whenever he touched her he knew consciously, as he had not done before, what the attraction of cruelty is, why the strong torment the weak. And therefore — though he could not have said why “therefore” — he also understood something that had never made much sense to him, or interested him at all: parental feeling. It gave him a most extraordinary pleasure when Pilun called him “tadde.”

He sat down on the bed platform under the window. It was a good-sized room with two platforms. The floor was matted; there was no other furniture, no chairs or tables, only a little movable fence that marked off a play space or screened Pilun’s bed. Takver had the long, wide drawer of the other platform open, sorting piles of papers kept in it. “Do hold Pilun, dear Dap.” she said with her large smile, when the baby began working towards him. “She’s been into these papers at least ten times, every time I get them sorted ill be done in just a minute here — ten minutes.”

“don’t hurry. I don’t want to talk. I just want to sit here. Come on, Pilun. Walk — there’s a girt! Walk k› Tadde Dap. Now I’ve got you!”

Pilun sat contentedly on his knees and studied his hand. Bedap was ashamed of his nails, which he no longer bit! but which remained deformed from biting, and at first he-closed his hand to hide them; then he was ashamed of shame, and opened up his hand. Pilun patted it.

“This is a nice room,” he said. “With the north light It’s always calm in here.”

“Yes. Sth, I’m counting these.”

After a while she put the piles of paper away and shut the drawer. “There! Sony. I told Shev I’d page that article for him. How about a drink?”

Rationing was still in force on many staple foods, though much less strict than it had been five years before. The fruit orchards of Northrising had suffered less and recovered quicker from the drought than the grain-growing regions, and last year dried fruits and fruit juices had gone oflE the restricted list. Takver had a bottle standing in the shaded window. She poured them each a cupful, in rather lumpy earthenware cups which Sadik had made at school. She sat down opposite Bedap and looked at him, smiling. “Well, how’s it going at PDC?”

“Same as ever. How’s the fish lab?”

Takver looked down into her cup, moving it to catch the light on the surface of the liquid. “I don’t know. I’m thinking of quitting.”

“Why, Takver?”

“Rather quit than be told to. The trouble is, I like that job, and I’m good at it. And it’s the only one like it in Abbenay. But you can’t be a member of a research team that’s decided you’re not a member of it.”

“They’re coming down harder on you, are they?”

“All the time,” she said, and looked rapidly and tin-consciously at the door, as if to be sure that Shevek wai not there, hearing. “Some of them are unbelievable. Well, you know. There’s no use going on about it.”

“No, that’s why I’m glad to catch you alone. I don’t really know. I, and Shev, and Skovan, and Gezach, and the rest of us who spend most of the time at the printing shop or the radio tower, don’t have postings, and so we don’t see much of people outside the Syndicate of Initiative. I’m at PDC a lot, but that’s a special situation, I expect opposition there because I create it. What is it that you run up against?”

“Hatred,” Takver said, in her dark, soft voice. “Real hatred. The director of my project won’t speak to me any more. Well, that’s not much loss. He’s a stick anyhow. But some of the others do tell me what they think… There’s a woman, not at the fish labs, here in the dom. I’m on the block sanitation committee and I had to go speak to her about something. She wouldn’t let me talk. ‘Don’t you try to come into this room, I know you, you damned traitors, you intellectuals, you egoizers’ and so on and so on, and then slammed the door. It was grotesque.” Takvec laughed without humor. Pilun, seeing her laugh, smiled as’ she sat curled in the angle of Bedap’s arm, and then yawned, “But you know, it was frightening. I’m a coward, Dap. I don’t like violence. I don’t even like disapproval I”

“Of course not. The only security we have is our neighbors’ approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can’t ‘break’ a custom; it’s the framework of your life with other people. We’re only just beginning to feel what it’s like to be revolutionaries, as Sfaev put it in the meeting today. And it isn’t comfortable.”

“Some people understand,” Takver said with determined optimism. “A woman on the omnibus yesterday, I don’t know where I’d met her, tenth-day work some time, I suppose; she said, ‘It must be wonderful to live with a great scientist, it must be so interesting!’ And I said, “Yes, at least there’s always something to talk about” … Pilun, don’t go to sleep, baby! Shevek will be home soon and well go to commons. Jiggle her, Dap. Well, anyway, you see, she knew who Shev was, but she wasn’t hateful or disapproving, she was very nice.”

“People do know who he is,” Bedap said. “It’s funny, because they can’t understand his books any more than I can. A few hundred do, he thinks. Those students in the Divisional Institutes who try to organize Simultaneity courses. I think a few dozen would be a liberal estimate, myself. And yet people know of him, they have this feeling he’s something to be proud of. That’s one thing the Syndicate has done, I suppose, if nothing else. Printed Shev’s books. It may be the only wise thing we’ve done.”

“Oh, now! You must have had a bad session at PDC today.”

“We did. I’d like to cheer you up, Takver, but I can’t The Syndicate is cutting awfully close to the basic societal bond, the fear of the stranger. There was a young fellow there today openly threatening violent reprisal. Well, it’s a poor option, but he’ll find others ready to take it. And that Rulag, by damn, she’s a formidable opponent!”

“You know who she is, Dap?”

“Who she is?”

“Shev never told you? Well, he doesn’t talk about her. She’s the mother.”

“Shev’s mother?”

Takver nodded. “She left when he was two. The father stayed with him. Nothing unusual, of course. Except Sfeev’s feelings. He feels that he lost something essential — he and the father both. He doesn’t make a general principle out of it, that parents should always keep the children, or anything. But the importance loyalty has for him, it goes back to that, I think.”

“What’s unusual,” said Bedap energetically, oblivious of Pilun, who had gone sound asleep on his lap, “distinctly unusual, is her feelings about him! She’s been waiting for him to come to an Import-Export meeting, you could tell, today. She knows he’s the soul of the group, and she hates us because of him. Why? Guilt? Has the Odonian Society gone so rotten we’re motivated by guilt?… You know, now that I know it, they look alike. Only in her, it’s all gone hard, rock-hard — dead.”

The door opened as he was speaking. Shevek and Sadik came in. Sadik was ten years old, tall for her age and thin, all long legs, supple and fragile, with a cloud of dark hair. Behind her came Shevek; and Bedap, looking at him in the curious new light of his kinship with Rulag, saw him as one occasionally sees a very old friend, with a vividness to which all the past contributes: the splendid reticent face, full of life but worn down, worn to the bone. It was an intensely individual face, and yet the features were not only like Rulag’s but like many others among the Anarresti, a people selected by a vision of freedom, and adapted to a barren world, a world of distances, silences, desolations.

In the room, meantime, much closeness, commotion, communion: greetings, laughter, Pilun being passed around, rather crossly on her part, to be hugged, the bottle being passed around to be poured, questions, conversations. Sadik was the center first, because she was the least often there of the family; then Shevek. “What did old Greasy Beard want?”

“Were you at the Institute?” Takver asked, examining him as he sat beside her.

“lust went by there. Sabul left me a note this morning at the Syndicate.” Shevek drank oS his fruit juice and lowered the cup, revealing a curious set to his mouth, a nonexpression. “He said the Physics Federation has a full-time posting to fill. Autonomous, permanent.”

“For you, you mean? There? At the Institute?”

He nodded.

“Sabul told you?”

“He’s trying to enlist you,” Bedap said.

“Yes, I think so. If you can’t uproot it, domesticate it, as we used to say in Northsetting.” Shevek suddenly and spontaneously laughed. “It is funny, isn’t it?” he said.

“No,” said Takver. “It isn’t funny. It’s disgusting. How could you go talk to him, even? After all the slander he’s spread about you, and the lies about the Principles being stolen from him, and not telling you that the Urrasti gave you that prize, and then just last year, when he got those kids who organized the lecture series broken up and sent away because of your ‘crypto-authoritarian influence’ over them — you an authoritarian! — that was sickening, unforgivable. How can you be civil to a man like that?”

“Well, it isn’t all Sabul, you know. He’s just a spokesman.”

“I know, but he loves to be the spokesman. And he’s been so squalid for so long! Well, what did you say to him?”

“I temporized — as you might say,” Shevek said, and laughed again. Takver glanced at him again, knowing now that he was, for all his control, in a state of extreme tension or excitement.

“You didn’t turn him down flat, then?”

“I said that I’d resolved some years ago to accept no regular work postings, so long as I was able to do theoretical work. So he said that since it was an autonomous post I’d be completely free to go on with the research rd been doing, and the purpose of giving me the post was to — let’s see how he put it — ‘to facilitate access to experimental equipment at the Institute, and to the regular channels of publication and dissemination.’ The PDC press, in other words.”

“Why, then you’ve won,” Takver said, looking at him with a queer expression, “You’ve won. They’ll print what you write. It’s what you wanted when we came back here five years ago. The walls are down.”

“There are walls behind the walls,” Bedap said.

“I’ve won only if I accept the posting. Sabul is offering to… legalize me. To make me official. In order to dissociate me from the Syndicate of Initiative. Don’t you see that as his motive, Dap?”

“Of course,” Bedap said. His face was somber. “Divide to weaken.”

“But to take Shev back into the Institute, and print what he writes on the PDC press, is to give implied approval to the whole Syndicate, isn’t it?”

“It might mean that to most people,” Shevek said.

“No, it won’t,” Bedap said. “It’ll be explained. The great physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while. Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicked deviationists. But the good Odonians at the Institute gently showed him his errors and he has returned to the path of social-organic truth. Leaving the Syndicate of Initiative shorn of its one conceivable claim to the attention of anybody on Anarres or Urras.”

“I’m not leaving the Syndicate, Bedap.”

Bedap lifted his head, and said after a minute, “No. I know you’re not.”

“All right Let’s go to dinner. This belly growls: listen to it, Pilun, hear it? Rrowr, rrowr!”

“Hup!” Pilun said in a tone of command. Shevek picked her up and stood up, swinging her onto his shoulder. Behind his head and the child’s, the single mobile hanging in this room oscillated slightly. It was a large piece made of wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disappeared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the two thin, clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval wires in complexly interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the common center, never quite meeting, never entirely parting. Takver called it the Inhabition of Time.

They went to the Pekesh commons, and waited till the registry board showed a sign-out, so they could bring Bedap in as a guest His registering there signed him out at the commons where he usually ate, as the system was coordinated citywide by a computer. It was one of the highly mechanized “homeostatic processes” beloved by the early Settlers, which persisted only in Abbenay. Like the less elaborate arrangements used elsewhere, it never quite worked out; there were shortages, surpluses, and frustrations, but not major ones. Sign-outs at Pekesh commons were infrequent, as the kitchen was the best known in Abbenay, having a tradition of great cooks. An opening appeared at last, and they went in. Two young people whom Bedap knew slightly as dom neighbors of Shevek’s and Takver’s joined them at table. Otherwise they were let alone — left alone. Which? It did not seem to matter. They had a good dinner, a good time talking. But every now and then Bedap felt that around them there was a circle of silence.

“I don’t know what the Urrasti will think up next,” he said, and though he was speaking lightly he found himself, to his annoyance, lowering his voice. “They’ve asked to come here, and asked Shev to come there; what will the next move be?”

“I didn’t know they’d actually asked Shev to go there,” Takver said with a half frown.

“Yes, you did,” Shevek said. “When they told me that they’d given me the prize, you know, the Seo Oen, they asked if I couldn’t come, remember? To get the money that goes with it!” Shevek smiled, luminous. If there was a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he had always been alone.

That’s right. I did know that. It just didnt register as an actual possibility. You’d been talking for decads about suggesting in PDC that somebody might go to Unas, just to shock them.”

“That’s what we finally did, this afternoon. Dap made me say it.”

“Were they shocked?”

“Hair on end, eyes bulging—”

Takver giggled. Pilun sat in a high chair next to Shevek, exercising her teeth on a piece of holum bread and her voice in song. “O mathery bathery,” she proclaimed, “ab-bery abbery babber dabP Shevek, versatile, replied in the same vein. Adult conversation proceeded without intensity and with interruptions. Bedap did not mind, he had learned long ago that you took Shevek with complications or not at all. The most silent one of them all was Sadik.

Bedap stayed on with them for an hour after dinner in the pleasant, spacious common rooms of the domicile, and when be got up to go offered to accompany Sadik to her school dormitory, which was on his way. At this something happened, one of those events or signals obscure to those outside a family; all he knew was that Shevek, with no fuss or discussion, was coming along. Takver had to go fted Pilun, who was getting louder and louder. She kissed Bedap, and he and Shevek set off with Sadik, talking. They talked hard, and walked right past the learning center. They turned back. Sadik had stopped before the dormitory entrance. She stood motionless, erect and slight, her face still, in the weak light of the street lamp. Shevek stood equally still for a moment, then went to her. “What is wrong, Sadik?”

The child said, “Shevek, may I stay in the room tonight?”

“Of course. But what’s wrong?”

Sadik’s delicate, long face quivered and seemed to fragment. “They don’t like me, in the dormitory,” she said, her voice becoming shrill with tension, but even softer than, before.

“They don’t like you? What do you mean?”

They did not touch each other yet. She answered him with desperate courage. “Because they don’t like — they don’t like the Syndicate, and Bedap, and — and you. They call — The big sister in the dorm room, she said you — we were all tr — She said we were traitors,” and saying the word the child jerked as if she had been shot, and Shevek caught her and held her. She held to him with all her strength, weeping in great gasping sobs. She was too old, too tall for him to pick up. He stood holding her, stroking her hair. He looked over her dark head at Bedap. His own eyes were full of tears. He said, “It’s all right, Dap. Go on.”

There was nothing for Bedap to do but leave them there, the man and the child, in that one intimacy which he could not share, the hardest and deepest, the intimacy of pain. It gave him no sense of relief or escape to go; rather lie felt useless, diminished. “I am thirty-nine years old,” he thought as he walked on towards his domicile, the five-man room where he lived in perfect independence. “Forty in a few decads. What have I done? What have I been doing? Nothing. Meddling. Meddling in other people’s lives because I don’t have one. I never took the time.

And the time’s going to run out on me, all at once, and I will never have had… that.” He looked back, down the long, quiet street, where the corner lamps made soft pools-of light in the windy darkness, but he had gone too far to see the father and daughter, or they had gone. And what he meant by “that” he could not have said, good as he was with words; yet he felt that he understood it clearly, that all his hope was in that understanding, and that if he would be saved he must change his life.

When Sadik was calm enough to let go of him, Shevek left her sitting on the front step of the dormitory, and went in to tell the vigflkeeper that she would be staying with the parents this night The vigilkeeper spoke coldly to him. Adults who worked in children’s dormitories had a natural tendency to disapprove of overnight dom visits, finding them disruptive; Shevek told himself he was probably mistaken in feeling anything more than such disapproval in the vigilkeeper. The halls of the learning center were brightly lit, ringing with noise, music practice, children’s voices. There were all the old sounds, the smells, the shadows, the echoes of childhood which Shevek remembered, and with them the fears. One forgets the fears.

He came out and walked home with Sadik, his arm around her thin shoulders. She was silent, still struggling. She said abruptly as they came to their entry in the Pekesh main domicile, “I know it isn’t agreeable for you and Takver to have me overnight.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“Because you want privacy, adult couples need privacy.”

“There’s Pilun,” he observed.

“Pilun doesn’t count”

“Neither do you.”

She sniffled, attempting to smile.

When they came into the light of the room, however, her white, red-patched, puffy face at once startled Takver into saying, “Whatever is wrong?” — and Pilun, interrupted in sucking, startled out of bliss, began to howl, at which Sadik broke down again, and for a while it appeared that everyone was crying, and comforting each other, and refusing comfort This sorted out quite suddenly into silence, Pilun on the mother’s lap, Sadik on the father’s.

When the baby was replete and put down to sleep,

Takver said in a low but impassioned voice, “Now! What is it?”

Sadik had gone half to sleep herself, her head on Shevek’s chest. He could feel her gather herself to answer. He stroked her hair to keep her quiet, and answered for her. “Some people at the learning center disapprove of us.”

“And by damn what damned right have they to disapprove of us?”

“Shh, shh. Of the Syndicate.”

“Oh,” Takver said, a queer guttural noise, and in buttoning up her tunic she tore the button right off the fabric. She stood looking down at it on her palm. Then she looked at Shevek and Sadik.

“How long has this been going on?”

“A long time.” Sadik said, not lifting her head.

“Days, decads, all quarter?”

“Oh, longer. But they get… they’re meaner in the dorm now. At night. Terzol doesn’t stop them.” Sadik spoke rather like a sleep-talker, and quite serenely, as if the matter no longer concerned her.

“What do they do?” Takver asked, though Shevek’s gaze warned her.

“Well, they… they’re just mean. They keep me out of the games and things. Tip, you know, she was a friend, she used to come and talk at least after lights out. But she stopped. Terzol is the big sister in the dorm now, and she’s… she says, ‘Shevek is— Shevek—’ ”

He broke in, feeling the tension rise in the child’s body, the cowering and the summoning of courage, unendurable. “She says, ‘Shevek is a traitor, Sadik is an egoizer’ — You know what she says, Takver His eyes were blazing. Takver came forward and touched her daughter’s cheek, once, rather timidly. She said in a quiet voice, “Yes, I know,” and went and sat down on the other bed platform, facing them.

The baby, rucked away next to the wall, snored slightly. People in the next room came back from commons, a door slammed, somebody down in the square called good night and was answered from an open window. The big domicile, two hundred rooms, was astir, alive quietly all round them; as their existence entered into its existence so did its existence enter into theirs, as part of a whole. Presently Sadik slipped ofi her father’s knees and sat on the plat form beside him, close to him. Her dark hair was rumpled and tangled, hanging around her face.

“I didn’t want to tell you, because…” Her voice sounded thin and small. “But it just keeps getting worse. They make each other meaner.”

•Then you wont go back there,” Shevek said. He put his arm around her, but she resisted, sitting straight.

“If I go and talk to them—” said Takver.

“It’s no use. They feel as they feel.”

“But what is this we’re up against?” Takver asked with bewilderment.

Shevek did not answer. He kept his arm around Sadik, and she yielded at last, leaning her head against his arm with a weary heaviness. “There are other learning centers,” he said at last, without much certainty.

Takver stood up. She clearly could not sit still and wanted to do something, to act. But there was not much to do. “Let me braid your hair, Sadik,” she said in a subdued voice.

She brushed and braided the child’s hair; they set the screen across the room, and tucked Sadik in beside the sleeping baby, Sadik was near tears again saying good night, but within half an hour they heard by her breathing that she was asleep.

Shevek had settled down at the head of their bed platform with a notebook and the slate he used for calculating.

“I paged that manuscript today,” Takver said.

“What did it come to?”

“Forty-one pages. With the supplement.”

He nodded. Takver got up, looked over the screen at the two sleeping children, returned, and sat down on the edge of the platform.

“I knew there was something wrong. But she didn’t say anything. She never has, she’s stoical. It didn’t occur to me it was this. I thought it was just our problem, it didnt occur to me they’d take it out on children.” She spoke softly and bitterly. “It grows, it keeps growing… Will another school be any different?’’

“I don’t know. If she spends much time with us, probably not”

“You certainly aren’t suggesting — •

“No, I’m not I’m stating a fact, only. If we choose to give the child the intensity of individual love, we can’t spare her what comes with that, the risk of pain. Pain from us, and through us.”

“It isn’t fair she should be tormented for what we do. She’s so good, and good-natured, she’s like clear water—” Takver stopped, strangled by a brief rush of tears, wiped her eyes, set her lips.

“It isn’t what we do. It’s what I do.” He put his notebook down. “You’ve been suffering for it too.”

“I don’t care what they think.”

“At work?”

“I can take another posting.”

“Not here, not in your own field.”

“Well, do you want me to go somewhere else? The Sor-ruba fishery labs at Peace-and-Plenty would take me on. But where does that leave you?” She looked at him angrily. “Here, I suppose?”

“I could come with you. Skovan and the others are coming along in Iotic, they’ll be able to handle the radio, and that’s my main practical function in the Syndicate now. I can do physics as well in Peace-and-Plenty as I can here. But unless I drop right out of the Syndicate of Initiative, that doesn’t solve the problem, does it? I’m the problem. I’m the one who makes trouble.”

“Would they care about that, in a little place like Peace-and-Plenty?”

“I’m afraid they might.”

“Shev, how much of his hatred have you run up against? Have you been keeping quiet, like Sadik?”

“And like you. Well, at times. When I went to Concord, last summer, it was a little worse than I told you. Rock-throwing, and a good-sized fight. The students who asked me to come had to fight for me. They did, too, but I got out quick; I was putting them in danger. Well, students want some danger. And after all we’ve asked for a fight, we’ve deliberately roused people. And there are plenty on our side. But now… but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not imperiling you and the children, Tak. By staying with you.”

“Of course you’re not in danger yourself,” she said savagely.

“I’ve asked for it. But it didn’t occur to me they’d extend their tribal resentment to you. I don’t feel the same about your danger as I do about mine.”

“Altruist!”

“Maybe. I can’t help it. I do feel responsible, Tak. Without me, you could go anywhere, or stay here. You’ve worked for the Syndicate, but what they hold against you is your loyalty to me. I’m the symbol. So there doesn’t… there isn’t anywhere for me to go.”

“Go to Urras,” Takver said. Her voice was so harsh that Shevek sat back as if she had hit him in the face.

She did not meet his eyes, but she repeated, more softly, “Go to Urras… Why not? They want you there. They don’t here! Maybe they’ll begin to see what they’ve lost, when you’re gone. And you want to go. I saw that tonight. I never thought of it before, but when we talked about the prize, at dinner, I saw it, the way you laughed.”

“I don’t need prizes and rewards!”

“No, but you do need appreciation, and discussion, and students — with no Sabul-strings attached. And look. You and Dap keep talking about scaring PDC with the idea of somebody going to Urras, asserting his right to self-determination. But if you talk about it and nobody goes, you’ve only strengthened their side — you’ve only proved that custom is unbreakable. Now you’ve brought it up in a PDC meeting, somebody will have to go. It ought to be you. They’ve asked you; you have a reason to go. Go get your reward — the money they’re saving for you,” she ended with a sudden quite genuine laugh.

“Takver, I don’t want to go to Urras!”

“Yes you do; you know you do. Though I’m not sure I know why.”

“Well, of course I’d like to meet some of the physicists… And see the laboratories at Ieu Eun where they’ve been experimenting with light” He looked shamefaced as he said it.

“It’s your right to do so,” Takver said with fierce determination. “If it’s part of your work, you ought to do it.”

“It would help keep the Revolution alive — on both sides — wouldn’t it?” he said. “What a crazy ideal Like Tirin’s play, only backwards. I’m to go subvert the archists… Well, it would at least prove to them that Anarres exists.

They talk with us on the radio, but I don’t think they really believe in us. In what we are.”

“If they did, they might be scared. They might come and blow us right out of the sky, if you really convinced them.”

“I don’t think so. I might make a little revolution in their physics again, but not in their opinions. It’s here, here, that I can affect society, even though here they won’t pay attention to my physics. You’re quite right; now that we’ve talked about it, we must do it” There was a pause. He said, “I wonder what kind of physics the other races do.”

“What other races?”

“The aliens. People from Ham and other solar systems. There are two alien Embassies on Urras, Hain and Terra. The Hainish invented the interstellar drive Urras uses now. I suppose they’d give it to us, too, if we were willing to ask for it. It would be interesting to…” He did not finish.

After another long pause he turned to her and said in a changed, sarcastic tone, “And-what would you do while I went visiting the propertarians?”

“Go to the Sorruba coast with the girls, and live a very peaceful life as a fish-lab technician. Until you come back.”

“Come back? Who knows if I could come back?”

She met his gaze straight on. “What would prevent you?”

“Maybe the Urrastt They might keep me. No one there is free to come and go, you know. Maybe our own people. They might prevent me from landing. Some of them in PDC threatened that, today. Rulag was one of them.”

“She would. She only knows denial. How to deny the possibility of coming home.”

“That is quite true. That says it completely,’’ he said, settling back again and looking at Takver with contemplative admiration. “But Rulag isn’t the only one, unfortunately. To a great many people, anyone who went to Urras and tried to come back would simply be a traitor, a spy.”

“What would they actually do about it?”

“Well, if they persuaded Defense of the danger, they could shoot down the ship.”

“Would Defense be that stupid?”

“I don’t think so. But anybody outside Defense could make explosives with blasting powder and blow up the ship on the ground. Or, more likely, attack me once I was outside the ship. I think that’s a definite possibility. It should be included in a plan to make a round-trip tour of the scenic areas of Urras.”

“Would it be worthwhile to you — that risk?”

He looked forward at nothing for a time. “Yes,” he said, “in a way. If I could finish the theory there, and give it to them — to us and them and all the worlds, you know — I’d like that. Here I’m walled in. I’m cramped, it’s hard to work, to test the work, always without equipment, without colleagues and students. And then when I do the work, they don’t want it. Or, if they do, like Sabul, they want me to abandon initiative in return for receiving approval. They’ll use the work I do, after I’m dead, that always happens. But why must I give my lifework as a present to Sabul, all the Sabuls, the petty, scheming, greedy egos of one single planet? I’d like to share it. It’s a big subject I work on. It ought to be given out, handed around. It won’t run out!”

“All right, then,” Takver said, “it is worth it”

“Worth what?”

“The risk. Perhaps not being able to come back.”

“Not being able to come back,” he repeated. He looked at Takver with a strange, intense, yet abstracted gaze.

“I think there are more people on our side, on the Syndicate’s side, than we realize. It’s just that we haven’t actually done much — done anything to bring them together — taken any risk. If you took it, I think they’d come out in support of you. If you opened the door, they’d smell fresh air again, they’d smell freedom.”

“And they might all come rushing to slam the door shut”

“If they do, too bad for them. The Syndicate can protect you when you land. And then, if people are still so hostile and hateful, well say the hell with them. What’s the good of an anarchist society that’s afraid of anarchists? We’ll go live in Lonesome, in Upper Sedep, in Uttermost, well go live alone in the mountains if we have to. There’s room. There’d be people who’d come with us. We’ll make a new community. If our society is settling down into politics and power seeking, then we’ll get out, well go make an Anarres beyond Anarres, a new beginning. How’s that?”

“Beautiful,” he said, “it’s beautiful, dear heart. But I’m Dot going to go to Urras, you know.”

“Oh, yes. And you will come back,” Takver said. Her eyes were very dark, a soft darkness, like the darkness of a forest at night. “If you set out to. You always get to where you’re going. And you always come back.”

“Don’t be stupid, Takver. I’m not going to Urras!”

“I’m worn out,” Takver said, stretching, and leaning over to put her forehead against his arm, “Let’s go to bed.”