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solid. They took Shevek away from his usual escorts and showed him through the whole Foundation, including every stage of the experimental interstellar propulsion system they were working on, from the computers and the drawing boards to a half-finished ship. enormous and surreal m the orange, violet, and yellow light within the vast geodesic hangar.
"You have so much," Shevek said to the engineer who bad taken charge of him, a man named Oegeo. "You have so much to work with, and you work with it so well. This is magnificent—the coordination, the cooperation, the greatness of the enterprise."
"Couldn't swing anything on this scale where you come from, eh?" the engineer said, grinning.
"Spaceships? Our space fleet is the ships the Settlers came in from Urras—built here on Urras—nearly two centuries ago. To build just a ship to carry grain across the sea, a barge, it takes a year's planning, a big effort of our economy."
Oegeo nodded. "Well, we've got the goods, all right.
But you know, you're the man who can tell us when to scrap this whole job—throw it all away."
'Throw it away? What do you mean?"
"Faster than light travel," Oegeo said. "Transilience. The old physics says it isn't possible. The Terrans say it isnt possible. But the Hainish, who after all invented the drive we use now, say that it is possible, only they dont know how to do it, because they're just learning temporal
physics from us. Evidently if it's in anybody's pocket, anybody in the known worlds. Dr. Shevek, it's in yours."
Shevek looked at him with a distancing stare, his light eyes hard and dear. "I am a theoretician, Oegeo. Not a designer."
"If you provide the theory, the unification of Sequency and Simultaneity in a general field theory of time, then weTl design the ships. And arrive on Terra, or Hain, or the next galaxy, in the instant we leave Urras! This tub," and he looked down the hangar at the looming framework of the half-built ship swimming in shafts of violet and orange light, "will be as outdated as an oxcart."
"You dream as you build, superbly," Shevek said, still withdrawn and stem. There was much more that Oegeo and the others wanted to show him and discuss with him,
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but before long he said, with a simplicity that precluded any ironic intention, "I think you had better take me back to the keepers."
They did so; they bade farewell with mutual warmth.
Shevek got into the car, and then got out again. "I was forgetting," he said, "is there time to see one other thing in Drio?"
"There isn't anything else in Drio," Pae said, polite as ever and trying hard to hide his annoyance over ShevA's five-hour escapade among the engineers.
"I should like to see the fort"
"What fort, sir?"
"An old castle, from the times of the kings. It was used later as a prison."
"Anything like that would have been torn down. The Foundation rebuilt the town entirely."
When they were in the car and the chauffeur was closing the doors, Chifoilisk (another probable source of Pae's ill humor) asked, **What did you want to see another castle for, Shevek? Should have thought you'd had enough old ruins to hold you for a while."
"The Fort in Drio was where Odo spent nine years,"
Shevek replied. His face was set, as it had been since he talked with Oegeo. "After the Insurrection of 747. She wrote the Prison Letters there, and the Analogy."
"Afraid it's been pulled down," Pae said sympathetically. "Drio was a moribund sort of town, and the Foundation just wiped out and started fresh."
•Shevek nodded. But as the car followed a riverside highway toward the tumoff to leu Eun it passed a bluff on the curve of the river Seisse, and up on the bluff there was a building, heavy, ruinous, implacable, with broken towers of black stone. Nothing could have been less like the gorgeous lighthearted buildings of the Space Research Foundation, the showy domes, the bright factories, the tidy lawns and paths. Nothing could have made them look so much like bits of colored paper.
"That, I believe, is the Fort," Chifoilisk remarked with his usual satisfaction at placing the tactless remark where it was least wanted.
"Gone all to ruins," Pae said. "Must be empty."
"Want to stop and have a look at it, Shevek?" Chifoilisk asked, ready to tap on the chauffeur's screen.
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"No," Shevek said.
He had seen what he wanted to see. There was still a Fort in Drio. He did not need to enter it and seek down ruined halls for the cell in which Odo had spent nine years. He knew what a prison cell was like.
He looked up, his face still set and cold, at the ponderous dark walls that now loomed almost above the car. I have been here for a long time, the fort said, and I am still here.
When he was back in ha rooms, after dinner in the Senior Faculty Refectory, he sat down alone by the unlighted fire. It was summer in A-lo, getting on towards the longest day of the year, and though it was past eight it was not yet dark. The sky outside the arched windows still showed a tinge of the daylight color of the sky, a pure tender blue. The air was mild, fragrant of cut grass and wet earth. There was a light in the chapel, across the grove, and a faint undertone of music on that lightly stirring air. Not the birds singing, but a human music. Shevek listened. Somebody was practicing the Numerical Harmonies on the chapel harmonium. They were as familiar to Shevek as to any Urrasti, Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.
The large, calm room was shadowy and silent, darkening. Shevek looked around it, the perfect double arches of the windows, the faintly gleaming edges of the parquet floor, the strong, dim curve of the stone chimney, the paneled walls, admirable in their proportion. It was a beautiful and humane room. It was a very old room. This Senior Faculty House, they told him, had been built in the year 54 0, four hundred years ago, two hundred and thirty years before the Settlement of Anarres. Generations of scholars had lived, worked, talked, thought, slept, died in this room before Odo was ever born. The Numerical Harmonies had drifted over the lawn, through the dark leaves of the grove, for centuries. I have been here for a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here.
What are you doing here?
He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and
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bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. The settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve.
The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong. WTOM in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are bom in exile.
He had come to love Urras, but what good was his yearning love? He was not part of it. Nor was he part of the world of his birth.
The loneliness, the certainty of isolation, that he had felt in his first hour aboard the Mindful, rose up in him and asserted itself as his true condition, ignored, suppressed, but absolute.
He was alone, here, because he came from a selfexiled society. He had alwavs been alone on his own world because he had exiled himself from his society.
The Settlers had taken one step away. He had taken two.