"In the Asylum on Segvina Island.'*
"In the Asylum?"
Bedap hunched his knees up to his chin and wrapped
his arms around them, as he sat sideways on the chair. He
spoke quietly now, with reluctance.
Tirin wrote a play and put it on, the year after you left. It was funny—crazy—you know his kind of thing."
Bedap ran a hand through his rough, sandy hair, loosening it from its queue. "It could seem anti-Odonian. if you were stupid. A lot of people are stupid. There was a fuss.
He got reprimanded. Public reprimand. I never saw one before. Everybody comes to your syndicate meeting and tells you off. It used to be how they cut a bossy gang foreman or manager down to size. Now they only use it to tell an individual to stop thinking for temself. It was bad. Tirin couldn't take it I think it really drove him a bit out of his mind. He felt everybody was against him, after that. He started talking too much—bitter talk. Not irrational, but always critical, always bitter. And he'd talk to anybody that way. Well, he finished at the Institute, qualified as a math instructor, and asked for a posting. He got one.
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To a road repair crew in Southsetting. He protested it as an error, but the Divlab computers repeated it. So he went."
"Tir never worked outdoors the whole time 1 knew him," Shevek interrupted. "Since he was ten. He always wangled desk jobs. Divlab was being fair."
Bedap paid no attention. "I don't really know what
happened down there. He wrote me several tunes, and each time he'd been reposted. Always to physical labor, in little outpost communities. He wrote that he was quitting his posting and coming back to Northsetting to see me. He didn't come. He stopped writing. I traced him through the Abbenay Labor Piles, finally. They sent me a copy of his card, and the last entry was just. Therapy. Segvina Island.' Therapy! Did Tirin murder somebody?
Did he rape somebody? What do you get sent to the Asylum for, beside that?"
"You don't get sent to the Asylum at all. You request posting to it."
"Don't feed me that crap," Bedap said with sudden rage. "He never asked to be sent there! They drove him crazy and then sent him there. It's Tirin I'm talking about, Tirin, do you remember him?"
"I knew him before you did. What do you think the Asylum is—a prison? It's a refuge. If there are murderers and chronic work-quitters there, it's because they asked to go there, where they're not under pressure, and safe from retribution. But who are these people you keep talking about—'they*? They* drove him crazy, and so on.
Are you trying to say that the whole social system is evil, that in fact 'they/ Tirin's persecutors, your enemies, they.' are us—the social organism?"
"If you can dismiss Tirin from your conscience as a work-quitter, I don*t think I have anything else to say to you," Bedap replied, sitting hunched up on the chair.
There was such plain and simple grief in his voice that Shevek's righteous wrath was stopped short,
Neither spoke for a while.
"I'd better go home," Bedap said, unfolding stiffly and standing up.
"It's an hour's walk from here. Don't be stupid."
"Well, I thought... since ... "
"Don't be stupid."
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"All right. Where's the shitteryT*
"Left, third door."
When he came back Bedap proposed to sleep on the floor, but as there was no rug and only one warm blanket, this idea was, as Shevek monotonously remarked, stupid. They were both glum and cross; sore, as if they had fist-fought but not fought all their anger out. Shevek unrolled the bedding and they lay down. At the turning out of the lamp a silvery darkness came into the room, the half darkness of a city night when there is snow on. the ground and light reflects faintly upward from the earth. It was cold. Each felt the warmth of the other's body as very welcome.
"I take it back about the blanket."
"Listen, Dap. I didn't mean to—"
"Oh, let's talk about it in the morning."
"Right."
They moved closer together. Shevek turned over onto his face and fell asleep within two minutes. Bedap struggled to hold on to consciousness, slipped into the warmth, deeper, into the defenselessness, the trustfulness of sleep, and slept. In the night one of them cried out aloud, dreaming. The other one reached his arm out sleepily, muttering reassurance, and the blind warm weight of his touch outweighed all fear.
They met again the next evening and discussed whether or not they should pair for a while, as they had when they were adolescent. It had to be discussed, because She-vek was pretty definitely heterosexual and Bedap pretty definitely homosexual; the pleasure of it would be mostly for Bedap. Shevek was perfectly willing, however, to reconfirm the old friendship; and when he saw that the sexual element of it meant a great deal to Bedap, was, to him, a true consummation, then he took the lead, and with considerable tenderness and obstinacy made sure that Bedap spent the night with him again. They took a free single in a domicile downtown, and both lived there for about a decad; then they separated again, Bedap to his dormitory and Shevek to Room 46. There was no strong sexual desire on either side to make the connection last. They had simply reasserted trust.
Yet Shevek sometimes wondered, as he went on seeing
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Bedap almost daily, what it was he liked and trusted in his friend. He found Bedap's present opinions detestable and his insistence on talking about them tiresome. They argued fiercely almost every time they met. They caused each other a good deal of pain. Leaving Bedap, Shevek frequently accused himself of merely clinging to an outgrown loyalty, and swore angrily not to see Bedap again.
But the fact was that he liked Bedap more as a man than he ever had as a boy. Inept, insistent, dogmatic, destructive: Bedap could be all that; but he had attained a freedom of mind that Shevek craved, though he hated its expression. He had changed Shevek's life, and Shevek knew it, knew that he was going on at last, and that it was Bedap who had enabled him to go on. He fought Bedap every step of the way, but he kept coming, to argue, to do hurt and get hurt, to find—under anger, denial, and re-jection—what he sought. He did not know what he sought.
But he knew where to look for it
It was, consciously, as unhappy a time for him as the year that had preceded it. He was still getting no further with his work; in fact he had abandoned temporal physics altogether and backtracked into humble lab work, setting up various experiments in the radiation laboratory with a deft, silent technician as partner, studying subatomic velocities. It was a well-trodden field, and his belated entry into it was taken by his colleagues as an admission that he had finally stopped trying to be original. The Syndicate of Members of the Institute gave him a course to teach, mathematical physics for entering students. He got no sense of triumph from finally having been given a course, for it was Just that: he had been given it, been permitted it. He got little comfort from anything. That the walls of his hard puritanical conscience were widening out immensely was anything but a comfort.
He felt cold and lost. But he had nowhere to retreat to, no shelter, so he kept coming farther out into the cold, getting farther lost.
Bedap had made many friends, an erratic and disaffected lot, and some of them took a liking to the shy man.
He felt no closer to them than to the more conventional people he knew at the Institute, but he found their independence of mind more interesting. They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming ec-
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centric. Some of them were intellectual nuchnibi who had not worked on a regular posting for years. Shevek disapproved of them severely, when he was not with them.
One of them was a composer named Salas. Salas and Shevek wanted to learn from each other. Salas had little math, but as long as Shevek could explain physics in the analogic or experiential modes, he was an eager and intelligent listener. In the same way Shevek would listen to anything Salas could tell him about musical theory, and anything Salas would play him on tape or on his instrument, the portative- But some of what Salas told him h& found extremely troubling. Salas had taken a posting to a canal-digging crew on the Plains of the Temae, east of Abbenay. He came into the city on his three days off each decad, and stayed with one girl or another, Shevek assumed that he had taken the posting because he wanted a bit of outdoor work for a change; but then he found that Salas had never had a posting in music, or in anything but unskilled labor.