The Dispossessed

Chapter 2

In a square window in a white wall is the clear, bare sky. In the center of the sky is the sun.

There are eleven babies in the room, most of them cooped up in large, padded pen-cots in pairs or trios, and settling down, with commotion and elocution, into their naps. The two eldest remain at large, a fat active one dismembering a pegboard and a knobby one sitting in the square of yellow sunlight from the window, staring up the sunbeam with an earnest and stupid expression.

In the anteroom the matron, a one-eyed woman with grey hair, confers with a tall, sad-looking man of thirty. “The mother’s been posted to Abbenay,” the man says. “She wants him to stay here.”

“Shall we take him into the nursery full-time, then, Palat?”

“Yes. I’ll be moving back into a dorm.”

“Don’t worry, he knows us all here! But surely Divlab will send you along after Rulag soon? Since you’re partners, and both engineers?”

“Yes, but she’s… It’s the Central Institute of Engineering that wants her, see. I’m not that good. Rulag has a great work to do.”

The matron nodded, and sighed. “Even so — !” she said with energy, and did not say anything else.

The father’s gaze was on the knobby infant, who had not noticed his presence in the anteroom, being preoccupied with light. The fat infant was at this moment coming towards the knobby one rapidly, though with a peculiar squatting gait caused by a damp and sagging diaper. He approached out of boredom or sociability, but once in the square of sunlight he discovered it was warm there. He sat down heavily beside the knobby one, crowding him into the shade.

The knobby one’s blank rapture gave place at once to a scowl of rage. He pushed the fat one, shouting, “Go ’way!”

The matron was there at once. She righted the fat one. “Shev, you aren’t to push other people.”

The knobby baby stood up. His face was a glare of sunlight and anger. His diapers were about to fall off. “Mine!” he said in a high, ringing voice. “Mine sun!”

“It is not yours,” the one-eyed woman said with the mildness of utter certainty. “Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it” And she picked the knobby baby up with gentle inexorable hands and set him aside, out of the square of sunlight.

The fat baby sat staring, indifferent. The knobby one shook all over, screamed, “Mine sun!” and burst into tears of rage.

The father picked him up and held him. “There, now, Shev,” he said. “Come on, you know you can’t have things. What’s wrong with you?” His voice was soft, and shook as if he also was not far from tears. The thin, long, light child in his arms wept passionately.

“There are some just can’t take life easy,” the one-eyed woman said, watching with sympathy.

“I’ll take him for a dom visit now. The mother’s leaving tonight, you see.”

“Go on. I hope you get posted together soon,” said the matron, hoisting the fat child like a sack of grain onto her hip, her face melancholy and her good eye squinting. “Byebye, Shev, little heart. Tomorrow, listen, tomorrow we’ll play truck-and-driver.”

The baby did not forgive her yet. He sobbed, clutching his father’s neck, and hid his face in the darkness of the lost sun.

The Orchestra needed all the benches that morning for rehearsal, and the dance group was thumping around in the big room of the learning center, so the kids who were working on Speaking-and-Listening sat in a circle on the foamstone floor of the workshop. The first volunteer, a lanky eight-year-old with long hands and feet, stood up. He stood very erect, as healthy children do; his slightly fuzzy face was pale at first, then turned red as he waited for the other children to listen. “Go on, Shevek,” the group director said.

“Well, I had an idea.”

“Louder,” said the director, a heavy-set man in his early twenties.

The boy smiled with embarrassment. “Well, see, I was thinking, let’s say you throw a rock at something. At a tree. You throw it, and it goes through the air and hits the tree. Right? But it can’t. Because — can I have the slate? Look, here’s you throwing the rock, and here’s the tree,” he scribbled on the slate, “that’s supposed to be a tree, and here’s the rock, see, halfway in between.” The children giggled at his portrayal of a holum tree, and he smiled. “To get from you to the tree, the rock has to be halfway in between you and the tree, doesn’t it. And then it has to be halfway between halfway and the tree. And then it has to be halfway between that and the tree. It doesn’t matter how far it’s gone, there’s always a place, only it’s a time really, that’s halfway between the last place it was and the tree—”

“Do you think this is interesting?” the director interrupted, speaking to the other children.

“Why can’t it reach the tree?” said a girl of ten.

“Because it always has to go half of the way that’s left to go,” said Shevek, “and there’s always half of the way left to go — see?”

“Shall we just say you aimed the rock badly?” the director said with a tight smile.

“It doesn’t matter how you aim it. It can’t reach the tree.”

“Who told you this idea?”

“Nobody. I sort of saw it. I think I see how the rock actually does—”

“That’s enough.”

Some of the other children had been talking, but they stopped as if struck dumb. The little boy with the slate stood there in the silence. He looked frightened, and scowled.

“Speech is sharing — a cooperative art. You’re not sharing, merely egoizing.”

The thin, vigorous harmonies of the orchestra sounded down the hall.

“You didn’t see that for yourself, it wasn’t spontaneous. I’ve read something very like it in a book.”

Shevek stared at the director. “What book? Is there one here?”

The director stood up. He was about twice as tall and three times as heavy as his opponent, and it was clear in his face that he disliked the child intensely; but there was no threat of physical violence in his stance, only an assertion of authority, a little weakened by his irritable response to the child’s odd question. “No! And stop egoizing!” Then he resumed his melodious pedantic tone: “This kind of thing is really directly contrary to what we’re after in a Speaking-and-Listening group. Speech is a two-way function. Shevek isn’t ready to understand that yet, as most of you are, and so his presence is disruptive to the group. You feel that yourself, don’t you, Shevek? I’d suggest that you find another group working on your level”

Nobody else said anything. The silence and the loud thin music went on while the boy handed back the slate and made his way out of the circle. He went off into the corridor and stood there. The group he had left began, under the director’s guidance, a group story, taking turns. Shevek listened to their subdued voices and to his heart still beating fast There was a surging in his ears which was not the orchestra but the noise that came when you kept yourself from crying; he had observed this singing noise several times before. He did not like listening to it, and he did not want to think about the rock and the tree, so he turned his mind to the Square. It was made of numbers, and numbers were always cool and solid; when he was at fault he could turn to them, for they had no fault. He had seen the Square in his mind a while ago, a design in space like the designs music made in time: a square of the first nine integers with 5 in the center. However you added up the rows they came out the same, all inequality balanced out; it was pleasant to look at. If only he could make a group that liked to talk about things like that; but there were only a couple of the older boys and girls who did, and they were busy. What about the book the director had spoken of? Would it be a book of numbers? Would it show how the rock got to the tree? He had been stupid to tell the joke about the rock and the tree, nobody else even saw it was a joke, the director was right. His head ached. He looked inward, inward to the calm patterns.

If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, Instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid.

Shevek had learned how to wait. He was good at it, an expert. He had first learned the skill waiting for his mother Rulag to come back, though that was so long ago he didn’t remember it; and he had perfected it waiting for his turn, waiting to share, waiting for a share. At the age of eight he asked why and how and what if, but he seldom asked when.

He waited till his father came to take him for a dom visit. It was a long wait: six decads. Palat had taken a short posting in maintenance in the Water Reclamation Plant in Drum Mountain, and after that he was going to take a decad at the beach in Malennin, where he would swim, and rest, and copulate with a woman named Pipar. He had explained all this to his son. Shevek trusted him, and he deserved trust. At the end of sixty days he came by the children’s dormitories in Wide Plains, a long, thin man with a sadder look than ever. Copulating was not really what he wanted. Rulag was. When he saw the boy, he smiled and his forehead wrinkled in pain.

They took pleasure in each other’s company.

“Palat, did you ever see any books with all numbers in them?”

“What do you mean, mathematics?”

“I guess so.”

“Like this?”

Palat took from his overtunic pocket a book. It was small, meant to be carried in a pocket, and like most books was bound in green with the Circle of Life stamped on the cover. It was printed very full, with small characters and narrow margins, because paper is a substance that takes a lot of holum trees and a lot of human labor to make, as the supplies dispenser at the learning center always remarked when you botched a page and went to get a new one. Palat held the book out open to Shevek. The double page was a series of columns of numbers. There they were, as he had imagined them. Into his hands he received the covenant of eternal justice. Logarithmic Tables, Bases 10 and 12, said the title on the cover above the Circle of Life.

The little boy studied the first page for some while. “What are they for?” he asked, for evidently these patterns were presented not only for their beauty. The engineer, sitting on a hard couch beside him in the cold, poorly lit common room of the domicile, undertook to explain logarithms to him. Two old men at the other end of the room cackled over their game of “Top ’Em.” An adolescent couple came in and asked if the single room was free tonight and went off to it. Rain hit hard on the metal roofing of the one-storey domicile, and ceased. It never rained for long. Palat got out his slide rule and showed Shevek its operation; in return Shevek showed him the Square and the principle of its arrangement. It was very late when they realized it was late. They ran through the marvelously rain-scented, muddy dark to the children’s dormitory, and got a perfunctory scolding from the vigil-keeper. They kissed quickly, both shaking with laughter, and Shevek ran to the big sleeping room, to the window, from which he could see his father going back down the single street of Wide Plains in the wet, electric dark.

The boy went to bed muddy-legged, and dreamed. He dreamed he was on a road through a bare land. Far ahead across the road he saw a line. As he approached it across the plain he saw that it was a wall. It went from horizon, to horizon across the barren land. It was dense, dark, and very high. The road ran up to it and was stopped.

He must go on, and he could not go on. The wall stopped him. A painful, angry fear rose up in him. He had to go on or he could never come home again. But the wall stood there. There was no way.

He beat at the smooth surface with his hands and yelled at it. His voice came out wordless and cawing. Frightened by the sound of it he cowered down, and then he heard another voice saying, “Look.” It was his father’s voice. He had an idea his mother Rulag was there too, though he did not see her (he had no memory of her face). It seemed to him that she and Palat were both on all fours in the darkness under the wall, and that they were bulkier than human beings and shaped differently. They were pointing, showing him something there on the ground, the sour dirt where nothing grew. A stone lay there. It was dark like the wall, but on it, or inside it, there was a number; a 5 he thought at first, then took it for 1, then understood what it was — the primal number, that was both unity and plurality. “That is the cornerstone,” said a voice of dear familiarity, and Shevek was pierced through with joy. There was no wall in the shadows, and he knew that he had come back, that he was home.

Later he could not recall the details of this dream, but that rush of piercing joy he did not forget. He had never known anything like it; so certain was its assurance of permanence, like one glimpse of a light that shines steadily, that he never thought of it as unreal though it had been experienced in dream. Only, however reliably there, he could not reattain it either by longing for it or by the act of will. He could only remember it, waking. When he dreamed of the wall again, as he sometimes did, the dreams were sullen and without resolution.

They had picked up the idea of “prisons” from episodes in the Life of Odo, which all of them who had elected to work on History were reading. There were many obscurities in the book, and Wide Plains had nobody who knew enough history to explain them; but by the time they got to Odo’s years in the Fort in Drio, the concept “prison” had become self-explanatory. And when a circuit history teacher came through the town he expounded the subject, with the reluctance of a decent adult forced to explain an obscenity to children. Yes, he said, a prison was a place where a State put people who disobeyed its Laws.

But why didn’t they just leave the place? They couldn’t leave, the doors were locked. Locked? Like the doors on a moving truck, so you don’t fall out, stupid! But what did they do inside one room all the time? Nothing. There was nothing to do. You’ve seen pictures of Odo in the prison cell in Drio, haven’t you? Image of defiant patience, bowed grey head, clenched hands, motionless in encroaching shadows. Sometimes prisoners were sentenced to work. Sentenced? Well, that means a judge, a person given power by the Law, ordered them to do some kind of physical labor. Ordered them? What if they didn’t want to do it? Well, they were forced to do it; if they didn’t work, they were beaten. A thrill of tension went through the children listening, eleven- and twelve-year-olds, none of whom had ever been struck, or seen any person struck, except in immediate personal anger.

Tirin asked the question that was in all their minds: “You mean, a lot of people would beat up one person?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t the others stop them?”

“The guards had weapons. The prisoners did not,” the teacher said. He spoke with the violence of one forced to say the detestable, and embarrassed by it.

The simple lure of perversity brought Tirin, Shevek, and three other boys together. Girls were eliminated from their company, they could not have said why. Tirin had found an ideal prison, under the west wing of the learning center. It was a space just big enough to hold one person sitting or lying down, formed by three concrete foundation walls and the underside of the floor above; the foundations being part of a concrete form, the floor of it was continuous with the walls, and a heavy slab of foamstone siding would close it off completely. But the door had to be locked. Experimenting, they found that two props wedged between a facing wall and the slab shut it with awesome finality. Nobody inside could get that door open.

“What about light?”

“No light,” Tirin said. He spoke with authority about things like this, because his imagination put him straight into them. What facts he had, he used, but it was not fact that lent him his certainty. “They let prisoners sit in the dark, in the Fort in Drio. For years.”

“Air, though,” Shevek said. “That door fits like a vacuum coupling. It’s got to have a hole in it.”

“It’ll take hours to bore through foamstone. Anyhow, who’s going to stay in that box long enough to run out of air!”

Chorus of volunteers and claimants.

Tirin looked at them, derisive. “You’re all crazy. Who wants to actually get locked into a place like that? What for?” Making the prison had been his idea, and it sufficed him; he never realized that imagination does not suffice some people, they must get into the cell, they must try to open the unopenable door.

“I want to see what it’s like,” said Kadagv, a broad-chested, serious, domineering twelve-year-old.

“Use your head!” Tirin jeered, but the others backed Kadagv. Shevek got a drill from the workshop, and they bored a two-centimeter hole through the “door” at nose height. It took nearly an hour, as Tirin had predicted.

“How long you want to stay in, Kad? An hour?”

“Look,” Kadagv said, “if I’m the prisoner, I can’t decide. I’m not free. You have to decide when to let me out.”

“That’s right,” said Shevek, unnerved by this logic.

“You can’t stay in too long, Kad. I want a turn!” said the youngest of them, Gibesh. The prisoner deigned no reply. He entered the cell. The door was raised and set in place with a bang, and the props wedged against it, all four jailers hammering them into place with enthusiasm. They all crowded to the air hole to see their prisoner, but since there was no light inside the prison except from the air hole, they saw nothing.

“Don’t suck all the poor fart’s air out!”

“Blow him in some.”

“Fart him in some!”

“How long’ll we give him?”

“An hour.”

“Three minutes.”

“Five years!”

“It’s four hours till lights-out. That ought to do it”

“But I want a turn!”

“All right, we’ll leave you in all night.”

“Well, I meant tomorrow.”

Four hours later they knocked the props away and released Kadagv. He emerged as a dominant of the situation as when he had entered, and said he was hungry, and it was nothing; he’d just slept mostly.

“Would you do it again?” Tirin challenged him.

“Sure.”

“No, I want second turn—”

“Shut up, Gib. Now, Kad? Would you walk right back in there now, without knowing when we’ll let you out?”

“Sure.”

“Without food?”

“They fed prisoners,” Shevek said. “That’s what’s so weird about the whole thing.”

Kadagv shrugged. His attitude of lofty endurance was intolerable.

“Look,” Shevek said to the two youngest boys, “go ask at the kitchen for leftovers, and pick up a bottle or something full of water, too.” He turned to Kadagv. “We’ll give you a whole sack of stuff, so you can. stay in that hole as long as you like.”

“As long as you like,” Kadagv corrected.

“All right. Get in there!” Kadagv’s self-assurance brought out Tirin’s satirical, play-acting vein. “You’re a prisoner. You don’t talk back. Understand? Turn around. Put your hands on your head.”

“What for?”

“You want to quit?”

Kadagv faced him sullenly.

“You can’t ask why. Because if you do we can beat you, and you have to just take it, and nobody will help you. Because we can kick you in the balls and you can’t kick back. Because you are not free. Now, do you want to go through with it?”

“Sure. Hit me.”

Tirin, Shevek, and the prisoner stood facing one another in a strange, stiff group around the lantern, in the darkness, among the heavy foundation walls of the building.

Tirin smiled arrogantly, luxuriously. “Don’t tell me what to do, you profiteer. Shut up and get into that cell!” And as Kadagv turned to obey, Tirin pushed him straight-arm in the back so that he fell sprawling. He gave a sharp grunt of surprise or pain, and sat up nursing a finger that had been scraped or sprained against the back wall of the cell. Shevek and Tirin did not speak. They stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their role as guards. They were not playing the role now, it was playing them. The younger boys returned with some holum bread, a melon, and a bottle of water. They were talking as they came, but the curious silence at the cell got into them at once. The food and water was shoved in, the door raised and braced. Kadagv was alone in the dark. The others gathered around the lantern. Gibesh whispered, “Where’ll he piss?”

“In his bed,” Tirin replied with sardonic clarity.

“What if he has to crap?” Gibesh asked, and suddenly went off into a peal of high laughter.

“What’s so funny about crapping?”

“I thought — what if he can’t see — in the dark—” Gibesh could not explain his humorous fancy fully. They all began to laugh without explanation, whooping till they were breathless. All were aware that the boy locked inside the cell could hear them laughing.

It was past lights-out in the children’s dormitory, and many adults were already in bed, though lights were on here and there in the domiciles. The street was empty. The boys careened down it laughing and calling to one another, wild with the pleasure of sharing a secret, of disturbing others, of compounding wickednesses. They woke up half the children in the dormitory with games of tag down the halls and among the beds. No adult interfered; the tumult died down presently.

Tirin and Shevek sat up whispering together for a long time on Tirin’s bed. They decided that Kadagv had asked for it, and would get two full nights in prison.

Their group met in the afternoon at the lumber recycling workshop, and the foreman asked where Kadagv was. Shevek exchanged a glance with Tirin. He felt clever, he felt a sense of power, in not replying. Yet when Tirin replied coolly that he must have joined another group for the day, Shevek was shocked by the lie. His sense of secret power suddenly made him uncomfortable: his legs itched, his ears felt hot. When the foreman spoke to him he jumped with alarm, or fear, or some such feeling, a feeling he had never had before, something like embarrassment but worse than that: inward, and vile. He kept thinking about Kadagv, as he plugged and sanded nail holes in three-ply holum boards and sanded the boards back to silky smoothness. Every time he looked into his mind there was Kadagv in it. It was disgusting.

Gibesh, who had been standing guard duty, came to Tirin and Shevek after dinner, looking uneasy. “I thought I heard Kad saying something in there. In a sort of funny voice.”

There was a pause. “We’ll let him out,” Shevek said.

Tirin turned on him. “Come on, Shev, don’t go mushy on us. Don’t get altruistic! Let him finish it out and respect himself at the end of it.”

“Altruistic, hell. I want to respect myself,” Shevek said, and set off for the learning center. Tirin knew him; he wasted no more time arguing with him, but followed. The eleven-year-olds trailed along behind. They crawled under the building to the cell. Shevek knocked one wedge free, Tirin the other. The door of the prison fell outward with a flat thump.

Kadagv was lying on the ground, curled up on his side. He sat up, then got up very slowly and came out. He stooped more than necessary under the low roof, and blinked a lot in the light of the lantern, but looked no different from usual. The smell that came out with him was unbelievable. He had suffered, from whatever cause, from diarrhea. There was a mess in the cell, and smears of yellow fecal stuff on his shirt. When he saw this in the lantern light he made an effort to hide it with his hand. Nobody said anything much.

When they had crawled out from under the building and were heading around to the dormitory, Kadagv asked, “How long was it?”

“About thirty hours, counting the first four.”

“Pretty long,” Kadagv said without conviction.

After getting him to the baths to clean up, Shevek went off at a run to the latrine. There he leaned over a bowl and vomited. The spasms did not leave him for a quarter of an hour. He was shaky and exhausted when they passed. He went to the dormitory common room, read some physics, and went to bed early. None of the five boys ever went back to the prison under the learning center. None of them ever mentioned the episode, except Gibesh, who boasted about it once to some older boys and girls; but they did not understand, and he dropped the subject.

The Moon stood high over the Northsetting Regional Institute of the Noble and Material Sciences. Four boys of fifteen or sixteen sat on a hilltop between patches of scratchy ground-holum and looked down at the Regional Institute and up at the Moon.

“Peculiar,” said Tirin. “I never thought before…”

Comments from the other three on the self-evidence of this remark.

“I never thought before,” said Tirin unruffled, “of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, ‘Look, there’s the Moon.’ Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth.”

“Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned.

“In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.

They all went on staring up at the brilliant, blurry turquoise, which was not quite round, a day past its full. The northern ice cap was dazzling. “It’s clear in the north,” Shevek said. “Sunny. That’s A-Io, that brownish bulge there.”

“They’re all lying around naked in the sun,” said Kvetur, “with jewels in their navels, and no hair.”

There was a silence.

They had come up to the hilltop for masculine company. The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. Everywhere they looked, waking or asleep, they saw girls. They had all tried copulating with girls; some of them in despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no difference. The girls were there.

Three days ago in a class on the History of the Odonian Movement they had all seen the same visual lesson, and the image of iridescent jewels in the smooth hollow of women’s oiled, brown bellies had since recurred to all of them, privately.

They had also seen the corpses of children, hairy like themselves, stacked up like scrap metal, stiff and rusty, on a beach, and men pouring oil over the children and lighting it. “A famine in Bachifoil Province in the Nation of Thu,” the commenter’s voice had said. “Bodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches. On the beaches of Tius, seven hundred kilometers away in the Nation of A-Io (and here came the jeweled navels), women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class (the Iotic words were used, as there was no equivalent for either word in Pravic) lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class.” A close-up of dinnertime: soft mouths champing and smiling, smooth hands teaching out for delicacies wetly mounded in silver bowls. Then a switch back to the blind, blunt face of a dead child, mouth open, empty, black, dry. “Side by side,” the quiet voice had said.

But the image that had risen like an oily iridescent bubble in the boys’ minds was all the same.

“How old are those films?” said Tirin. “Are they from before the Settlement, or are they contemporary? They never say.”

“What does it matter?” Kvetur said. “They were living like that on Urras before the Odonian Revolution. The Odonians all got out and came here to Anarres. So probably nothing’s changed — they’re still at it, there.” He pointed to the great blue-green Moon.

“How do we know they are?”

“What do you mean, Tir?” asked Shevek.

“If those pictures are a hundred and fifty years old, things could be entirely different now on Urras. I don’t say they are, but if they were, how would we know it? We don’t go there, we don’t talk, there’s no communication. We really have no idea what life’s like on Urras now.”

“People in PDC do. They talk to the Urrasti that man the freighters that come in at Port of Anarres. They keep informed. They have to, so we can keep up trade with Urras, and know how much of a threat they pose to us, too.” Bedap spoke reasonably, but Tirin’s reply was sharp: “Then PDC may be informed, but we’re not.”

“Informed!” Kverui said. “I’ve heard about Urras ever since nursery! I don’t care if I never see another picture of foul Urrasti cities and greasy Urrasti bodies!”

“That’s just it,” said Tirin with the glee of one following logic. “All the material on Urras available to students is the same. Disgusting, immoral, excremental. But look, If it was that bad when the Settlers left, how has it kept on going for a hundred and fifty years? If they were so sick, why aren’t they dead? Why haven’t their propertarian societies collapsed? What are we so afraid of?”

“Infection,” said Bedap.

“Are we so feeble we can’t withstand a little exposure? Anyhow, they can’t all be sick. No matter what their society’s like, some of them must be decent. People vary here, don’t they? Are we all perfect Odonians? Look at that snotball Pesus!”

“But in a sick organism, even a healthy cell is doomed,” said Bedap.

“Oh, you can prove anything using the Analogy, and you know it. Anyhow, how do we actually know their society is sick?”

Bedap gnawed on his thumbnail. “You’re saying that PDC and the educational supplies syndicate are lying to us about Urras.”

“No; I said we only know what we’re told. And do you know what we’re told?” Tirin’s dark, snub-nosed face, clear in the bright bluish moonlight, turned to them. “Kvet said it, a minute ago. He’s got the message. You heard it: detest Urras, hate Urras, fear Urras.”

“Why not?” Kvetur demanded. “Look how they treated us Odonians!”

“They gave us their Moon, didn’t they?”

“Yes, to keep us from wrecking their profiteering states and setting up the just society there. And as soon as they got rid of us, I’ll bet they started building up governments and armies faster than ever, because nobody was left to stop them. If we opened the Port to them, you think they’d come like friends and brothers? A thousand million of them, and twenty million of us? They’d wipe us out, or make us all what do you call it, what’s the word, slaves, to work the mines for them!”

“All right. I agree that it’s probably wise to fear Urras. But why hate? Hate’s not functional; why are we taught it? Could it be that if we knew what Urras was really like, we’d like it — some of it — some of us? That what PDC wants to prevent is not just some of them coming here, but some of us wanting to go there?”

“Go to Urras?” Shevek said, startled.

They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed. “Who’d ever want to go to Urras?” he demanded. “What for?”

“To find out what another world’s like. To see what a ‘horse’ is!”

“That’s childish,” Kvetur said. “There’s life on some other star systems,” and he waved a hand at the moon-washed sky, “so they say. What of it? We had the luck to be born here!”

“If we’re better than any other human society,” said Tirin, “then we ought to be helping them. But we’re forbidden to.”

“Forbidden? Nonorganic word. Who forbids? You’re externalizing the integrative function itself,” Shevek said, leaning forward and speaking with intensity. “Order is not ‘orders.’ We don’t leave Anarres, because we are Anarres. Being Tirin, you can’t leave Tirin’s skin. You might like to try being somebody else to see what it’s like, but you can’t. But are you kept from it by force? Are we kept here by force? What force — what laws, governments, police? None. Simply our own being, our nature as Odonians. It’s your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”

“Oh, hell, no. Can’t I talk? The trouble with you, Shev, is you don’t say anything till you’ve saved up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments, and then you dump them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap—”

Shevek sat back, looking vindicated.

But Bedap, a heavy-set, square-faced fellow, chewed on his thumbnail and said, “All the same, Tir’s point remains. It would be good to know that we knew all the truth about Urras.”

“Who do you think is lying to us?” Shevek demanded.

“Placid, Bedap met his gaze. “Who, brother? Who but ourselves?”

The sister planet shone down upon them, serene and brilliant, a beautiful example of the improbability of the real.

The afforestation of the West Temaenian Littoral was one of the great undertakings of the fifteenth decad of the Settlement on Anarres, employing nearly eighteen thousand people over a period of two years.

Though the long beaches of Southeast were fertile, supporting many fishing and farming communities, the arable area was a mere strip along the sea. Inland and westward clear across the vast plains of Southwest the land was uninhabited except for a few isolated mining towns. It was the region called the Dust.

In the previous geological era the Dust had been an immense forest of holums, the ubiquitous, dominant plant genus of Anarres. The current climate was hotter and drier. Millennia of drought had killed the trees and dried the soil to a fine grey dust that now rose up on every wind, forming hills as pure of line and barren as any sand dune. The Anarresti hoped to restore the fertility of that restless earth by replanting the forest. This was, Shevek thought, in accordance with the principle of Causative Reversibility, ignored by the Sequency school of physics currently respectable on Anarres, but still an intimate, tacit element of Odonian thought. He would like to write a paper showing the relationship of Odo’s ideas to the ideas of temporal physics, and particularly the influence of Causative Reversibility on her handling of the problem of ends and means. But at eighteen he didn’t know enough to write such a paper, and he never would know enough if he didn’t get back to physics soon and out of the damned Dust.

At night in the project camps everybody coughed. In the daytime they coughed less; they were too busy to cough. The dust was their enemy, the fine dry stuff that clogged the throat and lungs; their enemy and their charge, their hope. Once that dust had lain rich and dark in the shade of trees. After their long work, it might do so again.

Gimar was always humming the tune, and now in the hot evening returning to camp over the plain she sang the words aloud.

“Who does? Who’s ‘she’?” asked Shevek.

Gimar smiled. Her broad, silky face was smeared and caked with dust, her hair was full of dust, she smelled strongly and agreeably of sweat.

“I grew up in Southrising,” she said. “Where the miners are. It’s a miner song.”

“What miners?”

“Don’t you know? People who were already here when the Settlers came. Some of them stayed and joined the solidarity. Goldminers, tinminers. They still have some feast days and songs of their own. The tadde was a miner, he used to sing me that when I was little.”

“Well, then, who’s ‘she’?”

“I don’t know, it’s just what the song says. Isn’t it what we’re doing here? Bringing green leaves out of stones!”

“Sounds like religion.”

“You and your fancy book-words. It’s just a song. Oh, I wish we were back at the other camp and could have a swim. I stink!”

“I stink.”

“We all stink.”

“In solidarity…”

But this camp was fifteen kilos from the beaches of the Temae, and there was only dust to swim in.

There was a man in camp whose name, spoken, sounded like Shevek’s: Shevet. When one was called the other answered. Shevek felt a kind of affinity for the man, a relation more particular than that of brotherhood, because of this random similarity. A couple of times he saw Shevet eyeing him. They did not speak to each other yet.

Shevek’s first decads in the afforestation project had been spent in silent resentment and exhaustion. People who had chosen to work in centrally functional fields such as physics should not be called upon for these projects and special levies. Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy? The work needed doing, but a lot of people didn’t care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work. In fact, a lot of them could do it better than he could. He had been proud of his strength, and had always volunteered for the “heavies” on tenth-day rotational duty; but here it was day after day, eight hours a day, in dust and heat. All day he would look forward to evening when he could be alone and think, and the instant he got to the sleeping tent after supper his head flopped down and he slept like a stone till dawn, and never a thought crossed his mind.

He found the workmates dull and loutish, and even those younger than himself treated him like a boy. Scornful and resentful, he took pleasure only in writing to his friends Tirin and Rovab in a code they had worked out at the Institute, a set of verbal equivalents to the special symbols of temporal physics. Written out, these seemed to make sense as a message, but were in fact nonsense, except for the equation or philosophical formula they masked. Shevek’s and Rovab’s equations were genuine. Tirin’s letters were very funny and would have convinced anyone that they referred to real emotions and events, but the physics in them was dubious. Shevek sent off one of these puzzles often, once he found that he could work them out in his head while he was digging holes in rock with a dull shovel in a dust storm. Tirin answered several times, Rovab only once. She was a cold girl, he knew she was cold. But none of them at the Institute knew how wretched he was. They hadn’t been posted, just as they were beginning independent research, to a damned tree-planting project. Their central function wasn’t being wasted. They were working: doing what they wanted to do. He was not working. He was being worked.

Yet it was queer how proud you felt of what you got done this way — all together — what satisfaction it gave. And some of the workmates were really extraordinary people. Gimar, for instance. At first her muscular beauty had rather awed him, but now he was strong enough to desire her.

“Come with me tonight, Gimar.”

“Oh, no,” she said, and looked at him with so much surprise that he said, with some dignity of pain, “I thought we were friends.”

“We are.”

“Then—”

“I’m partnered. He’s back home.”

“You might have said,” Shevek said, going red.

“Well, it didn’t occur to me I ought to. I’m sorry, Shev.” She looked so regretfully at him that he said, with some hope, “You don’t think—”

“No, You can’t work a partnership that way, some bits for him and some bits for others.”

“Life partnership is really against the Odonian ethic, I think,” Shevek said, harsh and pedantic.

“Shit,” said Gimar in her mild voice, “Having’s wrong; sharing’s right. What more can you share than your whole self, your whole life, all the nights and all the days?”

He sat with his hands between his knees, his head bowed, a long boy, rawboned, disconsolate, unfinished. “I’m not up to that,” he said after a while.

“You?”

“I haven’t really ever known anybody. You see how I didn’t understand you. I’m cut off. Can’t get in. Never will. It would be silly for me to think about a partnership. That sort of thing is for… for human beings…”

With timidity, not a sexual coyness but the shyness of respect, Gimar put her hand on his shoulder. She did not reassure him. She did not tell him he was like everybody else. She said, “I’ll never know anyone like you again, Shev. I never will forget you.”

All the same, a rejection is a rejection. For all her gentleness he went from her with a lame soul, and angry.

The weather was very hot. There was no coolness except in the hour before dawn.

The man named Shevet came up to Shevek one night after supper. He was a stocky, handsome fellow of thirty. “I’m tired of getting mixed up with you,” he said. “Call yourself something else.”

The surly aggressiveness would have puzzled Shevek earlier. Now he simply responded in kind. “Change your own name if you don’t like it,” he said.

“You’re one of those little profiteers who goes to school to keep his hands clean, “the man said. “I’ve always wanted to knock the shit out of one of you.”

“Don’t call me profiteer!” Shevek said, but this wasn’t a verbal battle. Shevet knocked him double. He got in several return blows, having long arms and more temper than his opponent expected: but he was outmatched. Several people paused to watch, saw that it was a fair fight but not an interesting one, and went on. They were neither offended nor attracted by simple violence. Shevek did not call for help, so it was nobody’s business but his own. When he came to he was lying on his back on the dark ground between two tents.

He had a ringing in his right ear for a couple of days, and a split lip that took long to heal because of the dust, which irritated all sores. He and Shevet never spoke again. He saw the man at a distance, at other cookfires, without animosity. Shevet had given him what he had to give, and he had accepted the gift, though for a long time he never weighed it or considered its nature. By the time he did so there was no distinguishing it from another gift, another epoch in his growing up. A girl, one who had recently joined his work gang, came up to him just as Shevet had in the darkness as he left the cookfire, and his lip wasn’t healed yet… He never could remember what she said; she had teased him; again he responded simply. They went out into the plain in the night, and there she gave him the freedom of the flesh. That was her gift, and he accepted it. Like all children of Anarres he had had sexual experience freely with both boys and girls, but he and they had been children; he had never got further than the pleasure he assumed was all there was to it. Beshun, expert in delight, took him into the heart of sexuality, where there is no rancor and no ineptitude, where the two bodies striving to join each other annihilate the moment in their striving, and transcend the self, and transcend time.

It was all easy now, so easy, and lovely, out in the warm dust, in the starlight. And the days were long, and hot, and bright, and the dust smelled like Beshun’s body.

He worked now in the planting crew. The trucks had come down from Northeast full of tiny trees, thousands of seedlings raised in the Green Mountains, where it rained up to forty inches a year, the rain belt. They planted the little trees in the dust.

When they were done, the fifty crews who had worked the second year of the project drove away in the flatbed trucks, and they looked back as they went. They saw what they had done. There was a mist of green, very faint, on the pallid curves and terraces of the desert. On the dead land lay, very lightly, a veil of life. They cheered, sang, shouted from truck to truck. Tears came into Shevek’s eyes. He thought, She brings the green leaf from the stone… Gimar had been posted back to Southrising a long time ago. “What are you making faces about?” Beshun asked him, squeezing next to him, as the truck jounced and running her hand up and down his hard, dust-whitened arm.

“Women,” Vokep said, in the track depot in Tin Ore, Southwest. “Women think they own you. No woman can really be an Odonian.”

“Odo herself — ?

“Theory. And no sex life after Asieo was killed, right? Anyhow there’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.”

“You think they’re different from men there?”

“I know it. What a man wants is freedom. What a woman wants is property. She’ll only let you go if she can trade you for something else. All women are propertarians.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say about half the human race, said Shevek, wondering if the man was right. Beshun had cried herself sick when he got posted back to Northwest, had raged and wept and tried to make him tell her he couldn’t live without her and insisted she couldn’t live without him and they must be partners. Partners, as if she could have stayed with any one man for half a year!

The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. This frame of words could not contain the totality of experience any more than any other, and Shevek was aware of the area left out, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Certainly he had felt that he owned Beshun, possessed her, on some of those starlit nights in the Dust. And she had thought she owned him. But they had both been wrong; and Beshun, despite her sentimentality, knew it; she had kissed him goodbye at last smiling, and let him go. She had not owned him. His own body had, in its first outburst of adult sexual passion, possessed him indeed — and her. But it was over with. It had happened. It would never (he thought, eighteen years old, sitting with a traveling-acquaintance in the truck depot of Tin Ore at midnight over a glass of sticky sweet fruit drink, waiting to hitch a ride on a convoy going north), it could never happen again. Much would yet happen, but he would not be taken off guard a second time, knocked down, defeated. Defeat, surrender, had its raptures. Beshun herself might never want any joy beyond them. And why should she? It was she, in her freedom, who had set him free.

“You know, I don’t agree,” he said to long-faced Vokep, an agricultural chemist traveling to Abbenay. “I think men mostly have to learn to be anarchists. Women don’t have to learn.”

Vokep shook his head grimly. “It’s the kids,” he said. “Having babies. Makes ’em propertarians. They won’t let go.” He sighed. “Touch and go, brother, that’s the rule. Don’t ever let yourself be owned.”

Shevek smiled and drank his fruit juice. “I won’t,” he said.

It was a joy to him to come back to the Regional Institute, to see the low hills patchy with bronze-leaved scrub holum, the kitchen gardens, domiciles, dormitories, workshops, classrooms, laboratories, where he had lived since he was thirteen. He would always be one for whom the return was as important as the voyage out. To go was not enough for him, only half enough; he must come back. In such a tendency was already foreshadowed, perhaps, the nature of the immense exploration he was to undertake into the extremes of the comprehensible. He would most likely not have embarked on that years-long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river’s relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

He was glad, then, to get back to what was as close to a home as he had or wanted. But he found his friends there rather callow. He had grown up a good deal, this past year. Some of the girls had kept up with him, or passed him; they had become women. He kept clear, however, of anything but casual contact with the girls, because he really didn’t want another big binge of sex just yet; he had some other things to do. He saw that the brightest of the girls, like Rovab, were equally casual and wary; in the labs and work crews or in the dormitory common rooms, they behaved as good comrades and nothing else. The girls wanted to complete their training and start their research or find a post they liked, before they bore a child; but they were no longer satisfied with adolescent sexual experimentation. They wanted a mature relationship, not a sterile one; but not yet, not quite yet.

These girls were good companions, friendly and independent. The boys Shevek’s age seemed stuck in the end of a childishness that was running a bit thin and dry. They were overintellectual. They didn’t seem to want to commit themselves either to work or to sex. To hear Tirin talk he was the man who invented copulation, but all his affairs were with girls of fifteen or sixteen; he shied away from the ones his own age. Bedap, never very energetic sexually, accepted the homage of a younger boy who had a homosexual-idealistic crush on him, and let that suffice him. He seemed to take nothing seriously; he had become ironical and secretive. Shevek felt cut out from his friendship. No friendship held; even Tirin was too self-centered, and lately too moody, to reassert the old bond — if Shevek had wanted it. In fact, he did not. He welcomed isolation with all his heart. It never occurred to him that the reserve he met in Bedap and Tirin might be a response; that his gentle but already formidably hermetic character might form its own ambience, which only great strength, or great devotion, could withstand. All he noticed, really, was that he had plenty of time to work at last.

Down in Southeast, after he had got used to the steady physical labor, and had stopped wasting his brain on code messages and his semen on wet dreams, he had begun to have some ideas. Now he was free to work these ideas out, to see if there was anything in them.

The senior physicist at the Institute was named Mitis. She was not at present directing the physics curriculum, as all administrative jobs rotated annually among the twenty permanent postings, but she had been at the place thirty years, and had the best mind among them. There was always a kind of psychological clear space around Mitis, like the lack of crowds around the peak of a mountain. The absence of all enhancements and enforcements of authority left the real thing plain. There are people of inherent authority; some emperors actually have new clothes.

“I sent that paper you did on Relative Frequency to Sabul, in Abbenay,” she said to Shevek, in her abrupt, companionable way. “Want to see the answer?”

She pushed across the table a ragged bit of paper, evidently a corner torn off a larger piece. On it in tiny scribbled characters was one equation:

Shevek put his weight on his hands on the table and looked down at the bit of paper with a steady gaze. His eyes were light, and the light from the window filled them so they seemed clear as water. He was nineteen, Mitis fifty-five. She watched him with compassion and admiration.

“That’s what’s missing,” he said. His hand had found a pencil on the table. He began scribbling on the fragment of paper. As he wrote, his colorless face, silvered with fine short hair, became flushed, and his ears turned red.

Mitis moved surreptitiously around behind the table to sit down. She had circulatory trouble in her legs, and needed to sit down. Her movement, however, disturbed Shevek. He looked up with a cold annoyed stare.

“I can finish this in a day or two,” he said.

“Sabul wants to see the results when you’ve worked it out.”

There was a pause. Shevek’s color returned to normal, and he became aware again of the presence of Mitis, whom he loved. “Why did you send the paper to Sabul?” he asked. “With that big hole in it!” He smiled; the pleasure of patching the hole in his thinking made him radiant.

“I thought he might see where you went wrong. I couldn’t. Also I wanted him to see what you were after… He’ll want you to come there, to Abbenay, you know.”

The young man did not answer.

“Do you want to go?”

“Not yet.”

“So I judged. But you must go. For the books, and for the minds you’ll meet there. You will not waste that mind in a desert!” Mitis spoke with sudden passion. “It’s your duty to seek out the best, Shevek. Don’t let false egalitarianism ever trick you. You’ll work with Sabul, he’s good, he’ll work you hard. But you should be free to find the line you want to follow. Stay here one more quarter, then go. And take care, in Abbenay. Keep free. Power inheres in a center. You’re going to the center. I don’t know Sabul well; I know nothing against him; but keep this in mind: you will be his man.”

The singular forms of the possessive pronoun in Pravic were used mostly for emphasis; idiom avoided them. Little children might say “my mother,” but very soon they learned to say “the mother.” Instead of “my hand hurts,” it was “the hand hurts me,” and so on; to say “this one is mine and that’s yours” in Pravic, one said. “I use this one and you use that” Mitis’s statement, “You will be his man,” had a strange sound to it. Shevek looked at her blankly.

“There’s work for you to do,” Mitis said. She had black eyes, they flashed as if with anger. “Do it!” Then she went out, for a group was waiting for her in the lab. Confused, Shevek looked down at the bit of scribbled paper. He thought Mitis had been telling him to hurry up and correct his equations. It was not till much later that he understood what she had been telling him.

The night before he left for Abbenay his fellow students gave a party for him. Parties were frequent, on slight pretexts, but Shevek was surprised by the energy that went into this one, and wondered why it was such a fine one. Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.

Many of them must have saved up daily allowances for the party for days before. There were incredible amounts of food. The order for pastries was so large that the refectory baker had let his fancy loose and produced hitherto unknown delights: spiced wafers, little peppered squares to go with the smoked fish, sweet fried cakes, succulently greasy. There were fruit drinks, preserved fruit from the Reran Sea region, tiny salt shrimp, piles of crisp sweet-potato chips. The rich plentiful food was intoxicating. Everybody got very merry, and a few got sick.

There were skits and entertainments, rehearsed and impromptu. Tirin. got himself up in a collection of rags from the recycle bin and wandered among them as the Poor Urrasti, the Beggarman — one of the Iotic words everybody had learned in history. “Give me money,” he whined, shaking his hand under their noses. “Money! Money! Why don’t you give me any money? You haven’t got any? Liars! Filthy propertarians! Profiteers! Look at all that food, how did you get it if you haven’t any money?” He then offered himself for sale. “Bay me, bay me, for just a little money,” he wheedled.

“It isn’t bay, it’s buy” Rovab corrected him.

“Bay me, buy me, who cares, look, what a beautiful body, don’t you want it?” Tirin crooned, wagging his slender hips and batting his eyes. He was at last publicly executed with a fish knife and reappeared in normal clothing. There were skillful harp players and singers among them, and there was plenty of music and dancing, but more talk. They all talked as if they were to be struck dumb tomorrow.

As the night went on young lovers wandered off to copulate, seeking the single rooms; others got sleepy and went off to the dormitories; at last a small group was left amid the empty cups, the fishbones, and the pastry crumbs, which they would have to clean up before morning. But it was hours yet till morning. They talked. They nibbled on this and that as they talked. Bedap and Tirin and Shevek were there, a couple of other boys, three girls. They talked about the spatial representation of time as rhythm, and the connection of the ancient theories of the Numerical Harmonies with modern temporal physics. They talked about the best stroke for longdistance swimming. They talked about whether their childhoods had been happy. They talked about what happiness was.

“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light. He was still lanky, with big hands, protruding ears, and angular joints, but in the perfect health and strength of early manhood he was very beautiful. His dun-colored hair, like the others’, was fine and straight, worn at its full length and kept off the forehead with a band. Only one of them wore her hair differently, a girl with high cheekbones and a flat nose; she had cut her dark hair to a shiny cap all round. She was watching Shevek with a steady, serious gaze. Her lips were greasy from eating fried cakes, and there was a crumb on her chin.

“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I — I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding — this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain… If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could… get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self — ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality — the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness — that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.”

“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.”

Bedap shook his head. “No. Shev’s right,” he said. “Love’s just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don’t have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.”

The girl with short hair shook her head vehemently. “But we won’t! One in a hundred, one in a thousand, goes all the way, all the way through. The rest of us keep pretending we’re happy, or else just go numb. We suffer, but not enough. And so we suffer for nothing.”

“What are we supposed to do,” said Tirin, “go hit our heads with hammers for an hour every day to make sure we suffer enough?”

“You’re making a cult of pain,” another said. “An Odonian’s goal is positive, not negative. Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”

“What motivated Odo but an exceptional sensitivity to suffering — her own and others’?” Bedap retorted.

“But the whole principal of mutual aid is designed to prevent suffering!”

Shevek was sitting on the table, his long legs dangling, his face intense and quiet. “Have you ever seen anybody die?” he asked the others. Most of them had, in a domicile or on volunteer hospital duty. All but one had helped at one time or another to bury the dead.

“There was a man when I was in camp in Southeast. It was the first time I saw anything like this. There was some defect in the aircar engine, it crashed lifting off and caught fire. They got him out burned all over. He lived about two hours. He couldn’t have been saved; there was no reason for him to live that long, no justification for those two hours. We were waiting for them to fly in anesthetics from the coast. I stayed with him, along with a couple of girls. We’d been there loading the plane. There wasn’t a doctor. You couldn’t do anything for him, except just stay there, be with him. He was in shock but mostly conscious. He was in terrible pain, mostly from his hands. I don’t think he knew the rest of his body was all charred, he felt it mostly in his hands. You couldn’t touch him to comfort him, the skin and flesh would come away at your touch, and he’d scream. You couldn’t do anything for him. There was no aid to give. Maybe he knew we were there, I don’t know. It didn’t do him any good. You couldn’t do anything for him. Then I saw… you see… I saw that you can’t do anything for anybody. We can’t save each other. Or ourselves.”

“What have you left, then? Isolation and despair! You’re denying brotherhood, Shevek!” the tall girl cried.

“No — no, I’m not. I’m trying to say what I think brotherhood really is. It begins — it begins in shared pain.”

“Then where does it end?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know yet.”