pense. The natural, aesthetic origin of the desire to own things was concealed and perverted by economic and competitive compulsions, which in turn told on the qualitmof the things: all they achieved was a kind of mechanical lavishness. Here, instead, was grace, achieved through restraint.
A serving man took their coats at the door. One's wife came up to greet Shevek from the basement kitchen, where she had been instructing the cook.
As they talked before dinner, Shevek found himself speaking to her almost exclusively, with a friendliness, a wish to make her like him, that surprised himself. But it was so good to be talking with a woman again! No wonder he had felt his existence to be cut off, artificial, among men, always men, lacking the tension and attraction of the sexual difference. And Sewa One was attractive. Looking at the delicate lines of her nape and temples he lost his objections to the Urrasti fashion of shaving women's heads. She was reticent, rather timid; he tried to make her feel at ease with him, and was very pleased when he seemed to be succeeding.
They went in to dinner and were joined at the table by two children. Sewa Oiie apologized: "One simply can't find a decent nursemaid in this part of the country any more," she said. Shevek assented, without knowing what a nursemaid was. He was watching the little boys, with the same relief, the same delight He bad scarcely seen a child since he left Anarres.
They were very clean, sedate children, speaking when spoken to, dressed in blue velvet coats and breeches. They eyed Shevek with awe, as a creature from Outer Space.
The nine-year-old was severe with the seven-year-old, muttering at him not to stare, pinching him savagely when he disobeyed. The little one pinched back and tried to kick him under the table. The Principle of Superiority did not seem to be well established in his mind yet.
Oiie was a changed man at home. The secretive look left his face, and he did not drawl when he spoke. His family treated him with respect, but there was mutuality in the respect. Shevek had heard a good deal of Oiie's views on women, and was surprised to see that he treated his wife with courtesy, even delicacy. "This is chivalry," Sbevek thought, having recently learned the word, but he
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soon decided it was something better than that. Oiie was fond of his wife and trusted her. He behaved to her and to his children very much as an Anarresti might. In fact, at home, he suddenly appeared as a simple, brotherly kind of man, a free man.
It seemed to Shevek a very small range of freedom, a very narrow family, but he felt so much at ease, so much freer himself, that he was disinclined to criticize.
In a pause after conversation, the younger boy said in his small, clear voice, "Mr. Shevek doesn't have very good
manners. **
"Why not?" Shevek asked before Oiie's wife could reprove the child. '*What did I do?"
"You didn't say thank you."
"For what?"
"When I passed you the dish of pickles."
"Ini! Be quietl"
Sadik! Don't egoize! The tone was precisely the same.
"I thought you were sharing them with me. Were they a gift? We say thank you only for gifts, in my country.
We share other things without talking about it, you see. Would you like the pickles back again?"
"No, I don't like them," the child said, looking up with dark, very clear eyes into Shevek's face.
"That makes it particularly easy to share them," Shevek said. The older boy was writhing with the suppressed desire to pinch Ini. but Ini laughed, showing his little white teeth. After a while in another pause he said in a low voice, leaning towards Shevek, "Would you like to see my otter?"
"Yes."
"He's in the back garden. Mother put him out because she thought he might bother you. Some grownups don't like animals."
"I like to see them. We have no animals in my country."
"You don't?" said the older boy, staring. "Father! Mr. Shevek says they don't have any animals!"
Ini also stared. "But what do you have?"
"Other people. Fish. Worms. And holum trees."
"What are holum trees?"
The conversation went on for half an hour. It was the first time Shevek had been asked, on Urras, to describe
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Anarres. The children asked the questions, but the parents listened with interest. Shevek kept out of the ethical mode with some scrupulousness; he was not there to propdpm-dize his host's children. He simply told them what the Dust was like, what Abbenay looked like, what kind of clothes one wore, what people did when they wanted new clothes, what children did in school. This last became propaganda, despite his intentions. Ini and Aevi were entranced by his description of a curriculum that included fanning, carpentry, sewage reclamation, printing, plumbing, roadmending, playwriting, and all the other occupations of the adult community, and by his admission that nobody was ever punished for anything.
"Though sometimes," he said, "they make you go away by yourself for a while."
"But what," Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, "what keeps people in order? Why don't they rob and murder each other?"
"Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things
you take them from the depository. As for violence, well,
I dont know, Oiie; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coer-
cion is the least efficient means of obtaining order."
"All right, but how do you get people to do the dirty work?"
"What dirty work?" asked Oiie's wife, not following.
"Garbage collecting, grave digging," Oiie said; Shevek added, "Mercury mining," and nearly said, "Shit processing," but recollected the loti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.
"Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work; they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work postings, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they're for one half year only."
"But then the whole personnel must consist of people }ust learning the job."
"Yes. It's not efficient, but what else is to be done? You
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cant tell a man to work on a job that win cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should be do that?*'
"He can refuse the order?"
"It's not an order, Oiie. He goes to EMvlab—the Division of Labor office—and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs."
"But then why do people do the dirty work at all? Why do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?"
"Because they are done together. . . . And other reasons. You know, life on Anarres isn't rich, as it is here.
In the little communities there isn't very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenthday it's pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people. . . . And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe.
People like to do things. They like to do them welL People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I ami You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing.... But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all. work is done for the work's sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one's neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law.