“He must go down to the kitchens to get one.”
“Needn’t take half the day about it. Well, I won’t wait. Don’t want to take up what’s left of your morning. By the way, did you see the latest Bulletin of the Space Research Foundation? They print Reumere’s plans for the ansible.”
“What is the ansible?”
“It’s what he’s calling an instantaneous communication device. He says if the temporalists—that’s you, of course—will just work out the time inertia equations, the engineers—that’s him—will be able to build the damned thing, test it, and thus incidentally prove the validity of the theory, within months or weeks.”
“Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built before I have provided the cause.” He smiled again, rather less ingenuously. When Pae had shut the door behind himself, Shevek suddenly stood up. “You filthy profiteering liar!” he said in Pravic, white with rage, his hands clenched to keep them from picking something up and throwing it after Pae.
Efor came in carrying a cup and saucer on a tray. He stopped short, looking apprehensive.
“It’s all right, Efor. He didn’t—he didn’t want the cup. You can take it all now.”
“Very good, sir.”
“Listen. I should like no visitors, for a while. Can you keep them out?”
“Easy, sir. Anybody special?”
“Yes, him. Anybody. Say I am working.”
“He’ll be glad to hear that, sir,” Efor said, his wrinkles melting with malice for an instant; then with respectful familiarity, “Nobody you don’t want get past me,” and finally with formal propriety, “Thank you, sir, and good morning.”
Food, and adrenalin, had dispelled Shevek’s paralysis. He walked up and down the room, irritable and restless. He wanted to act. He had spent nearly a year now doing nothing, except being a fool. It was time he did something.
Well, what had he come here to do?
To do physics. To assert, by his talent, the rights of any citizen in any society: the right to work, to be maintained while working, and to share the product with all who wanted it. The rights of an Odonian and of a human being.
His benevolent and protective hosts let him work, and maintained him while working, all right. The problem came on the third limb. But he himself had not got there yet. He had not done his job. He couldn’t share what he didn’t have.
He went back to the desk, sat down, and took a couple of scraps of heavily scribbled paper out of the least accessible and least useful pocket of his tight-fitting, stylish trousers. He spread these scraps out with his fingers and looked at them. It occurred to him that he was getting to be like Sabul, writing very small, in abbreviations, on shreds of paper. He knew now why Sabul did it: he was possessive and secretive. A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behavior on Urras.
Again Shevek sat quite motionless, his head bowed, studying the two little bits of paper on which he had noted down certain essential points of the General Temporal Theory, so far as it went.
For the next three days he sat at the desk and looked at the two bits of paper.
At times he got up and walked around the room, or wrote something down, or employed the desk computer, or asked Efor to bring him something to eat, or lay down and fell asleep. Then he went back to the desk and sat there.
On the evening of the third day he was sitting, for a change, on the marble seat by the hearth. He had sat down there on the first night he entered his room, this gracious prison cell, and generally sat there when he had visitors. He had no visitors at the moment, but he was thinking about Saio Pae.
Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind; it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument. Yet its potentiality had been real, and though deformed had not been lost. Pae was a very clever physicist. Or, more exactly, he was very clever about physics. He had not done anything original, but his opportunism, his sense for where advantage lay, led him time after time to the most promising field. He had the flair for where to set to work, just as Shevek did, and Shevek respected it in him as in himself, for it is a singularly important attribute in a scientist. It was Pae who had given Shevek the book translated from the Terran, the symposium on the theories of Relativity, the ideas of which had come to occupy his mind more and more of late. Was it possible that after all he had come to Urras simply to meet Saio Pae, his enemy? That he had come seeking him, knowing that he might receive from his enemy what he could not receive from his brothers and friends, what no Anarresti could give him: knowledge of the foreign, of the alien: news…
He forgot Pae. He thought about the book. He could not state clearly to himself what, exactly, he had found so stimulating about it. Most of the physics in it was, after all, outdated; the methods were cumbersome, and the alien attitude sometimes quite disagreeable. The Terrans had been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but the physical and should not be taken as implying the metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of course, was superficially true; and yet he had used number, the bridge between the rational and the perceived, between psyche and matter, “Number the Indisputable,” as the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality.
Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the Terran’s thought Shevek caught this combination, was constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Having explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of spacetime, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields, at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclusively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound: at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept. And his refusal had been equally correct—in the long run. Only he had lacked the tools to provide it—the Saeba variables and the theories of infinite velocity and complex cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.
But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.
In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence—the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days, and indeed these last ten years—really matter?
He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear. The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Saeban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain
; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.
The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight. There was no end, no end…
And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears, as if he had been looking into the sun. After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one’s life has been fulfilled.
Yet he kept looking, and going farther, with that same childish joy, until all at once he could not go any farther; he came back, and looking around through his tears saw that the room was dark and the high windows were full of stars.
The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.
After a while he got up shakily and lighted the lamp. He wandered around the room a little, touching things, the binding of a book, the shade of a lamp, glad to be back among these familiar objects, back in his own world—for at this instant the difference between this planet and that one, between Urras and Anarres, was no more significant to him than the difference between two grains of sand on the shore of the sea. There were no more abysses, no more walls. There was no more exile. He had seen the foundations of the universe, and they were solid.
He went into the bedroom, walking slowly and a little unsteadily, and dropped onto the bed without undressing. He lay there with his arms behind his head, occasionally foreseeing and planning one detail or another of the work that had to be done, absorbed in a solemn and delightful thankfulness, which merged gradually into serene reverie, and then into sleep.
He slept for ten hours. He woke up thinking of the equations that would express the concept of interval. He went to the desk and set to work on them. He had a class that afternoon, and met it; he took his dinner at the Senior Faculty commons and talked with his colleagues there about the weather, and the war, and whatever else they brought up. If they noticed any change in him he did not know it, for he was not really aware of them at all. He came back to his room and worked.
The Urrasti counted twenty hours in a day. For eight days he spent twelve to sixteen hours daily at his desk, or roaming about his room, his light eyes turned often to the windows, outside which shone the warm spring sunlight, or the stars and the tawny, waning Moon.
Coming in with the breakfast tray, Efor found him lying half-dressed on the bed, his eyes shut, talking in a foreign language. He roused him. Shevek woke with a convulsive start, got up and staggered into the other room, to the desk, which was perfectly empty; he stared at the computer, which had been cleared, and then stood there like a man who has been hit on the head and does not know it yet. Efor succeeded in getting him to lie down again, and said, “Fever there, sir. Call the doctor?”
“No!”
“Sure, sir?”
“No! Don’t let anybody in here. Say I am ill, Efor.”
“Then they’ll fetch the doctor sure. Can say you’re still working, sir. They like that.”
“Lock the door when you go out,” Shevek said. His nontransparent body had let him down; he was weak with exhaustion, and therefore fretful and panicky. He was afraid of Pae, of Oiie, and of a police search party. Everything he had heard, read, half-understood about the Urrasti police, the secret police, came vivid and terrible into his memory, as when a man admitting his illness to himself recalls every word he ever read about cancer. He stared up at Efor in feverish distress.
“You can trust me,” the man said in his subdued, wry, quick way. He brought Shevek a glass of water and went out, and the lock of the outer door clicked behind him.
He looked after Shevek during the next two days, with a tact that owed little to his training as a servant.
“You should have been a doctor, Efor,” Shevek said, when his weakness had become a merely bodily, not unpleasant lassitude.
“What my old sow say. She never wants nobody nurse her beside me when she get the pip. She say, ‘You got the touch.’ I guess I do.”
“Did you ever work with the sick?”
“No sir. Don’t want to mix up with hospitals. Black day the day I got to die in one of them pest-holes.”
“The hospitals? What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing, sir, not them you be took to if you was worse,” Efor said with gentleness.
“What kind did you mean, then?”
“Our kind. Dirty. Like a trashman’s ass-hole,” Efor said, without violence, descriptively. “Old. Kid die in one. There’s holes in the floor, big holes, the beams show through, see? I say, ‘How come?’ See, rats come up the holes, right in the beds. They say, ‘Old building, been a hospital six hundred years.’ ’Stablishment of the Divine Harmony for the Poor, its name. An ass-hole what it is.”
“It was your child that died in the hospital?”
“Yes, sir, my daughter, Laia.”
“What did she die of?”
“Valve in her heart. They say. She don’t grow much. Two years old when she died.”
“You have other children?”
“Not living. Three born. Hard on the old sow. But now she say, ‘Oh, well, don’t have to be heartbreaking over ’em, just as well after all!’ Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” The sudden switch to upper-class syntax jolted Shevek, he said impatiently, “Yes! Go on talking.”
Because he had spoken spontaneously, or because he was unwell and should be humored, this time Efor did not stiffen up. “Think of going for army medic, one time,” he said, “but they get me first Draft. Say, ‘Orderly, you be orderly.’ So I do. Good training, orderly. Come out of the army straight into gentlemen’s service.”
“You could have been trained as a medic, in the army?” The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch. All these things occurred in Efor’s reminiscences as commonplaces or as commonplace horrors. Shevek had to exercise his imagination and summon every scrap of knowledge he had about Urras to understand them at all. And yet they were familiar to him in a way that nothing he had yet seen here was, and he did understand.
This was the Urras he had learned about in school on Anarres. This was the world from which his ancestors had fled, preferring hunger and the desert and endless exile. This was the world that had formed Odo’s mind and had jailed her eight times for speaking it. This was the human suffering in which the ideals of his society were rooted, the ground from which they sprang.
It was not “the real Urras.” The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job.
“Look tired again sir,” Efor said. “Better rest.”
“No, I’m not tired.”
Efor observed him a moment. When Efor functioned as a servant his lined, clean-shaven face was quite expressionless; during the last hour Shevek had seen it go through extraordinary changes of harshness, humor, cynicism and pain. At the moment its expression was sympathetic yet detached.
“Different from all that where you come from,” Efor said.
“Very different.”
“Nobody ever out of work, there.”
There was a faint edge of irony, or question, in his voice.
“No.”
“And nobody hungry?”
“Nobody goes hungry while another eats.”
“Ah.”
“But we have been hungry. We have starved. There was a famine, you know, eight years ago. I knew a woman then who killed her baby, because she had no milk, and there was nothing else, nothing else to give it. It is not all…all milk and honey on Anarres, Efor.”
“I don’t doubt it, sir,” Efor said with one of his curious returns to polite diction. Then he said with a grimace drawing his lips back from his teeth, “All the same there’s none of them there!”
“Them?”
“You know, Mr. Shevek. What you said once. The owners.”
The next evening Atro called by. Pae must have been on the watch, for a few minutes after Efor admitted the old man, he came strolling in, and inquired with charming sympathy after Shevek’s indisposition. “You’ve been working much too hard these last couple of weeks, sir,” he said, “you mustn’t wear yourself out like this.” He did not sit down, but took his leave very soon, the soul of civility. Atro went on talking about the war in Benbili, which was becoming, as he put it, “a large-scale operation.”
“Do the people in this country approve of this war?” Shevek asked, interrupting a discourse on strategy. He had been puzzled by the absence of moral judgment in the birdseed papers on this subject. They had given up their ranting excitement; their wording was often exactly the same as that of the telefax bulletins issued by the government.
“Approve? You don’t think we’d lie down and let the damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world power is at stake!”
“But I meant the people, not the government. The…the people who must fight.”
“What’s it to them? They’re used to mass conscriptions. It’s what they’re for, my dear fellow! To fight for their country. And let me tell you, there’s no better soldier on earth than the Ioti man of the ranks, once he’s broken in to taking orders. In peacetime he may sprout sentimental pacifism, but the grit’s there, underneath. The common soldier has always been our greatest resource as a nation. It’s how we became the leader we are.”
The Dispossessed Page 26
