One's own pleasure, and the respect of one's fellows. That
is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mighty force."
"No one ever defies it?"
"Perhaps not often enough," Shevek said.
"Does everybody work so hard, then?" Oiie's wife asked. "What happens to a man who just won't cooperate?"
"Well, he moves on. The others get tired of him, you know. They make fun of him, or they get rough with him, beat him up; in a small community they might agree to take his name off the meals listing, so he has to cook and eat all by himself; that is humiliating. So he moves on, and stays in another place for a while, and then maybe
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moves on again. Some do it all their lives. Nuchnibf, they're called. I am a sort of nuchnib. I am here evading my own work posting. I moved farther than most." *he-vek spoke tranquilly; if there was bitterness in his voice it was not discernible to the children, nor explicable to the adults. But a little silence followed on his words.
"I don't know who does the dirty work here," he said.
"I never see it being done. It's strange. Who does it? Why do they do it? Are they paid more?"
"For dangerous work, sometimes. For merely menial tasks, no. Less."
"Why do they do them, then?"
"Because low pay is better than no pay," Oiie said, and the bitterness in his voice was quite clear. His wife began speaking nervously to change the subject, but he went on,
"My grandfather was a janitor. Scrubbed floors and changed dirty sheets in a hotel for fifty years. Ten hours a day, six days a week. He did it so that he and his family could eat." Oiie stopped abruptly, and glanced at Shevek with his old secretive, distrustful look, and then, almost with defiance, at his wife. She did not meet his eyes. She smiled and said in a nervous, childish voice, "Demaere's father was a very successful man. He owned four companies when he died." Her smile was that of a person in pain, and her dark, slender hands were pressed tightly one over the other.
"I don't suppose you have successful men on Anarres,"
Oiie said with heavy sarcasm. Then the cook entered to change the plates, and he stopped speaking at once. Th& child Ini, as if knowing that the serious talk would not resume while the servant was there, said, "Mother, may Mr. Shevek see my otter when dinner's over?"
When they returned to the sitting room Ini was allowed to bring in his pet: a half-grown land otter, a common animal on Unas. They had been domesticated,
Oiie explained, since prehistoric times, first for use as fish retrievers, then as pets. The creature had short legs, an
arched and supple back, glossy dark-brown fur. It was the first uncaged animal Shevek had seen close up, and it was more fearless of him than he was of it. The white, sharp teeth were impressive. He put his hand out cautiously to stroke it. as Ini insisted he do. The otter sat up on its haunches and looked at him. Its eyes were dark, shot
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with gold, intelligent, curious, innocent. "Ammar," She-vek whispered, caught by that gaze across the gulf of being—"brother."
The otter grunted, dropped to all fours, and examined Shevek's shoes with interest.
"He likes you," Ini said.
"I like him," Shevek replied, a little sadly. Whenever he saw an animal, the flight of birds, the splendor of autumn trees, that sadness came into him and gave delight a cutting edge. He did not think consciously of Takver at such moments, he did not think of her absence.
Rather ft was as if she were there though he was not thinking about her. It was as if the beauty and straagenesa of the beasts and plants of Urras had been charged with a message for him by Takver, who would never see them, whose ancestors for seven generations had never touched an animal's warm fur or seen the flash of wings in ths shade of trees.
He spent the night in a bedroom under the eaves. It was cold, which was welcome after the perpetual overheating of rooms at the University, and quite plain: the bedstead, bookcases, a chest, a chair, and a painted wooden table. It was like home, he thought, ignoring the height of the bedstead and the softness of the mattress, the fine woollen blankets and silk sheets, the knickknacks of ivory on the chest, the leather bindings of the books, and the fact that the room, and everything in it, and the house it was in, and the land the house stood on, was private-property, the property of Demaere Oiie, though he hadn't built it, and didn't scrub its floors. Shevek put aside such tiresome discriminations. It was a nice room and not really so different from a single in a domicile.
Sleeping in that room, he dreamed of Takver. He dreamed that she was with him in the bed, that her arms were about him, her body against his body ... but what room, what room were they in? Where were they? They were on the Moon together, it was cold, and they were walking along together. It was a flat place, the Moon, all covered with bluish-white snow, though the snow was thin and easily kicked aside to show the luminous white ground. It was dead, a dead place. "It isn't really like this," he told Takver, knowing she was frightened. They were walking towards something, a distant line of some-
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thing that looked flimsy and shiny like plastic, a remote, hardly visible barrier across the white plain of snow. In his heart Shevek was afraid to approach it, but he told Takver "We'll be there soon." She did not answer him.
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Chapter 6
When Shevek was sent home after a decad in hospital, his neighbor in Room 45 came in to see him. He was a mathematician, very tall and thin. He had an uncorrected walleye, so that you never could be sure whether he was looking at you and/or you were looking at him. He and Shevek had coexisted amicably, side by side in the Institute domicile, for a year, without ever saying a full sentence to each other.
Desar now came in and stared at or beside Shevek.
"Anything?" he said.
"I'm doing fine, thanks."
"What about bring dinner commons."
"With yours?" Shevek said, influenced by Desar's telegraphic style.
"All right."
Desar brought two dinners on a tray over from the Institute refectory, and they ate together in Shevek's room. He did the same morning and night for three days till Shevek felt up to going out again. It was hard to see why Desar did this. He was not friendly, and the expectations of brotherhood seemed to mean little to him. One reason he held aloof from people was to hide his dishonesty; he was either appallingly la2y or frankly propertarian, for
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Room 45 was full of stuff that he had no right or reason to keep—dishes from commons, books from libraries, a set of woodcarving tools from a craft-supply depot, a microscope from some laboratory, eight different blankets, a closet stuffed with clothes, some of which plainly did not fit Desar and never had, others of which appeared to be things he had worn when he was eight or ten. It looked as if he went to depositories and warehouses and picked things up by the armload whether he needed them or not. "What do you keep all this junk for?" Shevek asked when he was first admitted to the room. Desar stared between him. "Just builds up," he said vaguely.
Desar's chosen field in mathematics was so esoteric that nobody in the Institute or the Math Federation could really check on his progress. That was precisely why he had chosen it. He assumed that Shevek's motivation was the same. "Hell," he said, "work? Good post here. Sequency. Simultaneity, shit," At some moments Shevek liked Desar, and at others detested him, for the same qualities. He stuck to him, however, deliberately, as part of his resolution to change his life.
His illness had made him realize that if he tried to go on
alone he would break down altogether. He saw this in moral terms, and judged himself ruthlessly. He bad been keeping himself for himself, against the ethical imperative of brotherhood. Shevek at twenty-one was not a prig, exactly, because his morality was passionate and drastic;