The Dispossessed

Chapter 13

Before they broke orbit, the view ports were filled with the cloudy turquoise of Urras, immense and beautiful. But the ship turned, and the stars came into sight, and Anarres among them like a round bright rock: moving yet not moving, thrown by what hand, timelessly circling, creating time.

They showed Shevek all over the ship, the interstellar Davenant. It was as different as it could be from the freighter Mindful From the outside it was as bizarre and fragile-looking as a sculpture in glass and wire; it did not have the look of a ship, a vehicle, about it at all, not even a front and back end, for it never traveled through any atmosphere thicker than that of interplanetary space. Inside, it was as spacious and solid as a house. The rooms were large and private, the walls wood-paneled or covered with textured weavings, the ceilings high. Only it was like a house with the blinds drawn, for few rooms had view ports, and it was very quiet. Even the bridge and the engine rooms had this quietness about them, and the machines and instruments had the simple definitiveness of design of the fittings of a sailing ship. For recreation, there was a garden, where the lighting had the quality of sunlight, and the air was sweet with the smell of earth and leaves; during ship night the garden was darkened, and its ports cleared to the stars.

Though its interstellar journeys lasted only a few hours or days shiptime, a near-lightspeed ship such as this might spend months exploring a solar system, or years in orbit around a planet where its crew was living or exploring. Therefore it was made spacious, humane, livable, for those who must live aboard it. Its style had neither the opulence of Urras nor the austerity of Anarres, but struck a balance, with the effortless grace of long practice. One could imagine leading that restricted life without fretting at its restrictions, contentedly, meditatively. They were a meditative people, the Hainish among the crew, civil, considerate, rather somber. There was little spontaneity in them. The youngest of them seemed older than any of the Terrans aboard.

But Shevek was seldom very observant of them, Terrans or Hainish, during the three days that the Davenant, moving by chemical propulsion at conventional speeds, took to go from Urras to Anarres. He replied when spoken to; he answered questions willingly, but he asked very few. When he spoke, it was out of an inward silence. The people of the Davenant, particularly the younger ones, were drawn to him, as if he had something they lacked or was something they wished to be. They discussed him a good deal among themselves, but they were shy with him. He did not notice this. He was scarcely aware of them. He was aware of Anarres, ahead of him. He was aware of hope deceived and of the promise kept; of failure; and of the sources within his spirit, unsealed at last, of joy. He was a ma” released from jail, going home to his family. Whatever such a man sees along his way he sees only as reflections of the light.

On the second day of the voyage he was in the communications room, talking with Anarres on the radio, first on the PDC wave length and now with the Syndicate of Initiative. He sat leaning forward, listening, or answering with a spate of the clear, expressive language that was his native tongue, sometimes gesturing with his free hand as if his interlocutor could see him, occasionally laughing. The first mate of the Davenant, a Hainishman named Ketho, controlling the radio contact, watched nun thoughtfully. Ketho had spent an hour after dinner the night before with Shevek, along with the commander and other crew members; he had asked — in a quiet, undemanding, Hainish way — a good many questions about Anarres.

Shevek turned to him at last. “All right, done. The rest can wait till I’m home. Tomorrow they will contact you to arrange the entry procedure.”

Ketho nodded. “You got some good news,” he said.

“Yes, I did. At least some, what do you call it, lively news.” They had to speak Iotic together; Shevek was more fluent in the language than Ketho, who spoke it very correctly and stiffly. “The landing is going to be exciting,” Shevek went on. “A tot of enemies and a lot of friends will be there. The good news is the friends… It seems there are more of them than when I left.”

“This danger of attack, when you land,” Ketho said. “Surely the officers of the Port of Anarres feel that they can control the dissidents? They would not deliberately tell you to come down and be murdered?”

“Well, they are going to protect me. But I am also a dissident, after all. I asked to take the risk. That’s my privilege, you see, as an Odonian.” He smiled at Ketho. The Hainishman did not smile back; his face was serious. He was a handsome man of about thirty, tall and light-skinned like a Cetian, but nearly hairless like a Terran, with very strong, fine features.

“I am glad to be able to share it with you,” he said. “I will be taking you down in the landing craft.”

“Good,” Shevek said. “It isn’t everyone who would care to accept our privileges!”

“More than you think, perhaps,” Ketho said. “lf you would allow them to.”

Shevek, whose mind had not been fully on the conversation, had been about to leave; this stopped him. He looked at Ketho, and after a moment said, “Do you mean that you would like to land with me?”

The Hainishman answered with equal directness,, “Yes, I would.”

“Would the commander permit it?”

“Yes. As an officer of a mission ship, in fact, ft is part of my duty to explore and investigate a new world when possible. The commander and I have spoken of the pos sibility. We discussed it with our ambassadors before we left. Their feeling was that no formal request should be made, since your people’s policy is to forbid foreigners to land.”

“Hm,” Shevek said, noncommittal. He went over to the far wall and stood for a while in front of a picture, a Hainish landscape, very simple and subtle, a dark river flowing among reeds under a heavy sky. “The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement of Anarres,” he said, “do not permit Urrasti to land, except inside the boundary of the Port. Those terms still are accepted. But you’re not an Urrasti.”

“When Anarres was settled, there were no other races known. By implication, those terms include all foreigners.”

“So our managers decided, sixty years ago, when your people first came into this solar system and tried to talk with us. But I think they were wrong. They were just building more walls.” He turned around and stood, his hands behind his back, looking at the other man. “Why do you want to land, Ketho?”

“I want to see Anarres,” the Hainishman said. “Even before you came to Urras, I was curious about it. It began when I read Odo’s works. I became very interested. I have—” He hesitated, as if embarrassed, but continued in his repressed, conscientious way, “I have learned a little Pravic. Not much yet”

“It is your own wish, then — your own initiative?”

“Entirely.”

“And you understand that it might be dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“Things are… a little broken loose, on Anarres. That’s what my friends on the radio have been telling me about. It was our purpose all along — our Syndicate, this journey of mine — to shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchists! All this has been going on while I was gone. So, you see, nobody is quite sure what happens next. And if you land with me, even more gets broken loose. I cannot push too far. I cannot take you as an official representative of some foreign government. That will not do, oa Anarres.”

“I understand that.”

“Once you are there, once you walk through the wall with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become an Anarresti, with the same options as all the others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe.” He looked around the tranquil, orderly room, with its simple consoles and delicate instruments, its high ceiling and windowless walls, and back at Ketho. “You would find yourself very much alone,” he said.

“My race is very old,” Ketho said. “We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest, but I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?”

“We are the children of time,” Shevek said, in Pravic. The younger man looked at him a moment, and then repeated the words in Iotic: “We are the children of time.”

“All right,” Shevek said, and laughed. “All right, am-marl You had better call Anarres on the radio again — the Syndicate, first… I said to Keng, the ambassador, that I had nothing to give in return for what her people and yours have done for me; well, maybe I can give you something in return. An idea, a promise, a risk…”

“I shall speak to the commander,” Ketho said, as grave as ever, but with a very slight tremor in his voice of excitement, of hope.

Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the Davenanfs garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. Shevek stood at the high, cleared view port, looking at the night side of Anarres, a dark curve across half the stars. He was wondering if Takver would be there, at the Port, She had not yet arrived in Abbenay from Peace-and-Plenty when he last talked with Bedap, so he had left it to Bedap to discuss and decide with her whether it would be wise for her to come out to the Port. “You don’t think I could stop her even if it wasn’t?” Bedap had said. He wondered also what kind of ride she might have got from the Sorruba coast; a dirigible, he hoped, if she had brought the girls along. Train riding was hard, with children. He still recalled the discomforts of the trip from Chakar to Abbenay, in ’68, when Sadik had been trainsick for three mortal days.

The door of the garden room opened, increasing the dim illumination. The commander of the Davenant looked in and spoke his name; he answered; the commander came in, with Ketho.

“We have the entry pattern for our landing craft from your ground control,” the commander said. He was a short, iron-colored Terran, cool and businesslike. “If you’re ready to go, well start launch procedure.”

“Yes.”

The commander nodded and left. Ketho came forward to stand beside Shevek at the port.

“You’re sure you want to walk through this wall with me, Ketho? You know, for me, it’s easy. Whatever happens, I am coming home. But you are leaving home. True journey is return…”

“I hope to return,” Ketho said in his quiet voice. “In time.”

“When are we to enter the landing craft?”

“In about twenty minutes.”

“I’m ready. I have nothing to pack.” Shevek laughed, a laugh of clear, unmixed happiness. The other man looked at him gravely, as if he was not sure what happiness was, and yet recognized or perhaps remembered it from afar. He stood beside Shevek as if there was something he wanted to ask him. But he did not ask it. “It will be early morning at Anarres Port,” he said at last, and took his leave, to get his things and meet Shevek at the launch port.

Alone, Shevek turned back to the observation port, and saw the blinding curve of sunrise over the Temae, just coming into sight.

“I will lie down to sleep on Anarres tonight,” he thought. “I will lie down beside Takver. I wish I’d brought the picture, the baby sheep, to give Pilun.”

But he had not brought anything. His hands were empty, as they had always been.