The decads went by, and the quarters. Two or three times a year the reward came: a letter from Atro or another physicist in A-Io or Thu, a long letter, close-written, close-argued, all theory from salutation to signature, all intense abstruse meta-mathematical-ethico-cosmologi-cal temporal physics, written in a language he could not speak by men he did not know, fiercely trying to combat and destroy his theories, enemies of his homeland, rivals, strangers, brothers.
For days after getting a letter he was irascible and joyful, worked day and night, foamed out ideas like a fountain. Then slowly, with desperate spurts and struggles, he came back to earth, to dry ground, ran dry.
He was finishing his third year at the Institute when Gvarab died. He asked to speak at her memorial service, which was held, as the custom was, in the place where the dead person had worked: in this case one of the lecture rooms in the Physics laboratory building. He was the only speaker. No students attended; Gvarab had not taught for two years. A few elderly members of the Institute came, and Gvarab's middle-aged son, an agricultural chemist from Northeast, was there. Shevek stood where the old woman had used to stand to lecture. He told these people, in a voice hoarsened by his now customary winter chest cold, that Gvarab had laid the foundations of the science of time, and was the greatest cosmologist who had ever worked at the Institute. "We in physics have our Odo now," he said. "We have her, and we did not honor her." Afterwards an old woman thanked him, with tears in her eyes. "We always took tenthdays together, her and me, janitoring in our block, we used to have such good times talking," she said, wincing in the icy wind as they came out of the building. The agricultural chemist muttered civilites and hurried off to catch a ride back to Northeast. In a rage of grief, impatience, and futility, Shevek struck off walking at random through the city.
Three years here, and he had accomplished what? A
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book, appropriated by Sabul; five or six unpublished papers; and a funeral oration for a wasted life.
Nothing he did was understood. To put it more honestly, nothing he did was meaningful. He was fulfilling no necessary function, personal or social. In fact—it was not an uncommon phenomenon in his field—he had burnt out at twenty. He would achieve nothing further. He had come up against the wall for good.
He stopped in front of the Music Syndicate auditorium to read the programs for the decad. There was no concert tonight. He turned away from the poster and came face to face with Bedap.
Bedap, always defensive and rather nearsighted, gave no sign of recognition. Shevek caught his arm.
"Shevekt By damn, it's you!" They hugged each other, kissed, broke apart, hugged again. Shevek was overwhelmed by love. Why? He had not even much liked Bedap that last year at the Regional Institute. They had
never written, these three years. Their friendship was a boyhood one, past. Yet love was there: flamed up as from shaken coal.
They walked, talked, neither noticing where they went.
They waved their arms and interrupted each other. The wide streets of Abbenay were quiet in the winter night. At each crossing the dim streetlight made a pool of silver, across which dry snow flurried like shoals of tiny fish, chasing their shadows. The wind came bitter cold behind the snow. Numbed lips and chattering teeth began to interfere with conversation. They caught the ten o'clock omnibus, the last, to the Institute; Bedap's domicile was out on the east edge of the city, a long pull in the cold.
He looked at Room 46 with ironic wonder. "Shev, you live like a rotten Urrasti profiteer."
"Come on, it's not that bad. Show me anything excre-mental!" The room in fact contained just about what it had when Shevek first entered it. Bedap pointed: "That blanket"
"That was here when I came. Somebody handmade it,
and left it when they moved. Is a blanket excessive on a
night like this?"
"It's definitely an excremental color," Bedap said. "As a functions analyst I must point out that there is no need for orange. Orange serves no vital function in the social
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organism at either the cellular or the organic level, and certainly not at the holorganismic or most centrally ethical level; in which case tolerance is a less good choice then excretion. Dye it dirty green, brotheri What's all this stuff?"
"Notes."
"In code?" Bedap asked, looking through a notebook with the coolness Shevek remembered was characteristic of him. He had even less sense of privacy—or private ownership—than roost Anarresti. Bedap had never had a favorite pencil that he carried around with him, or an old shirt he had got fond of and hated to dump in the recycle bin, and if given a present he tried to keep it out of regard for the giver's feelings, but always lost it. He was conscious of this trait and said it showed he was less primitive than most people, an early example of the Promised Man, the true and native Odonian. But he did have a sense of privacy. It began at the skull, his own or another's, and from there on in it was complete. He never pried. He said now, "Remember those fool letters we used to write in code when you were on the afforestation project?"
"That isn't code, it's lotic."
"You've learned lotic? Why do you write in it?"
"Because nobody on this planet can understand what
I'm saying. Or wants to. The only one who did died three
days ago."
"Sabul's dead?"
"No. Gvarab. Sabul isn't dead. Fat chance!"
"What's the trouble?"
"The trouble with Sabul? Half envy, the other half incompetence."
"I thought his book on causality was supposed to be first-rate. You said so."
"I thought so. til! I read the sources. They're all Urrasti ideas. Not new ones, either. He hasn't had a thought of his own for twenty years. Or a bath."
"How are your thoughts?" asked Bedap, putting a hand on the notebooks and looking at Shevek under his brows.
Bedap had small, rather squinting eyes, a strong face, a thickset body. He bit his fingernails, and in years of doing so had reduced them to mere strips across his thick, sensitive fingertips.
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"No good," said Shevek, sitting down on the bed platform. "I'm in the wrong field."
Bedap grinned. "You?"
"I think at the end of this quarter I'll ask for reposting.** 'To what?"
"I don't care. Teaching, engineering. I've got to get out of physics."
Bedap sat down in the desk chair, bit a fingernail, and said, "That sounds odd."
"I've recognized my limitations,"
"I didn't know you had any. In physics, I mean. You had all sorts of limitations and defects. But not in physics. I'm no temporalist, I know. But you don't have to be able to swim to know a fish, you don't have to shine to recognize a star... ."
Shevek looked at his friend and said, blurted out, what he had never been able to say clearly to himself: "I've thought of suicide. A good deal. This year. It seems the best way."
"It's hardly the way to come out on the other side of suffering."
Shevek smiled stiffly. "You remember that?"
"Vividly. It was a very important conversation to me.
And to Takver and Tirin, I think."
"Was it?" Shevek stood up. There was only four steps'
pacing room, but he could not hold still. "It was important to me then," he said, standing at the window. "But I've changed, here. There's something wrong here. I don't know what it is."
"I do," Bedap said. "The wall. You've come up against the wall."
Shevek turned with a frightened look. "The wall?"
"In your case, the wall seems to be Sabul, and his supporters in the science syndicates and the PDC. As for me, I've been in Abbenay four decads. Forty days. Long enough to see that in forty years here I'll accomplish nothing, nothing at all, of what I want to do, the improvement of science instruction in the learning centers. Unless things are changed. Or unless I join the enemies."