He felt sick and enraged, and there was nobody he could talk to. Pae was out of the question. Atro was an ardent militarist. Oiie was an ethical man, but his private insecurities, his anxieties as a property owner, made him cling to rigid notions of law and order. He could cope with his personal liking for Shevek only by refusing to admit that Shevek was an anarchist. The Odonian society called itself anarchistic, he said, but they were in fact mere primitive populists whose social order functioned without apparent government because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbor states. When their property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would
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either wake up to reality or be wiped out. The Benbili rebels were waking up to reality now: they were finding freedom is no good if you have no guns to back it up. He explained this to Shevek in the one discussion they had on the subject. It did not matter who governed, or Aught they governed, the Benbilis: the politics of reality concerned the power struggle between A-Io and Thu.
"The politics of reality," Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, "That is a curious phrase for a physicist to use."
"Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic laws of the world."
"You put your petty miserable 'laws' to protect wealth,
your 'forces' of guns and bombs, in the same sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!"
Oue shrank from that thunderbolt of contempt. He said no more, and Shevek said no more, but Oiie never forgot it. It lay imbedded in his mind thereafter as the most shameful moment of his life. For if Shevek the deluded and simple-minded utopist had silenced him so easily, that was shameful; but if Shevek the physicist and the man whom he could not help liking, admiring, so that he longed to deserve his respect, as if it were somehow a finer grade of respect than any currently available elsewhere—if this Shevek despised him. then the shame was intolerable, and he must hide it, lock it away the rest of his life in the darkest room of his soul.
The subject of the Benbili revolution had sharpened certain problems for Shevek also: particularly the problem of his own silence,
It was difficult for him to distrust the people he was with. He had been brought up in a culture that relied deliberately and constantly on human solidarity, mutual aid. Alienated as he was in some ways from that culture, and alien as he was to this one, still the lifelong habit remained: he assumed people would be helpful. He trusted them.
But Chifoilisk's warnings, which he had tried to dismiss, kept returning to him. His own perceptions and instincts reinforced them. Like it or not, he must leam distrust. He
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must be silent; he must keep his property to himself, he must keep his bargaining power.
He said little, these days, and wrote down less. His desk was a moraine of insignificant papers; his few working notes were always right on his body, in one of his numerous Urrasti pockets. He never left his desk computer without clearing it
He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the loti wanted so badly for their spacefiight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do so. He had never admitted either fact clearly to anyone.
Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in his grasp. He bad the equations. Sabul knew he had them, and had offered him reconciliation, recognition, in return for the chance to print them and get in on the glory. He had refused Sabul, but it had not been a grand moral gesture. The moral gesture, after all, would have been to give them to his own press at the Syndicate of Initiative, and he hadn't done that either. He wasn't quite sure he was ready to publish. There was something not quite right, something that needed a little refining. As he had been working ten years on the theory, it wouldn't hurt to take a little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth.
The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A crack right through the foundations. . . . The night before he left Anarres he had bumed every paper he had on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been bluffing them.
Or had he been bluffing himself?
It was quite possible that a general theory of temporality was an illusory goal. It was also possible that, though Sequency and Simultaneity might someday be unified in a general theory, he was not the man to do the job. He had been trying for ten years and had not done it. Mathematicians and physicists, athletes of intellect, do their great work young. It was more than possible—probable—that he was burnt out, finished.
He was perfectly aware that he had had the same low moods and intimations of failure in the periods iust before his moments of highest creativity. He found himself trying to encourage himself with that fact, and was furious at
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his own naivete. To interpret temporal order as causal order was a pretty stupid thing for a chronosophist to do.
Was he senile already? He had better simply get to work on the small but practical task of refining the concept of interval. It might be useful to someone else. *
But even in that, even in talking with other physicists about it, he felt that he was holding something back. And they knew he was.
He was sick of holding back, sick of not talking, not talking about the revolution, not talking about physics, not talking about anything.
He crossed the campus on his way to a lecture. The birds were singing in the newly leafed trees. He had not heard them sing all winter, but now they were at it, pouring it out, the sweet tunes. Ree-dee, they sang, tee-dee.
This is my propertee-tee, this is my territoree-ree-ree, it belongs to mee, mee.
Shevek stood still for a minute under the trees, listening.
Then he turned off the path, crossed the campus in a different direction, towards the station, and caught a morning train to Nio Esseia. There had to be a door open somewhere on this damned planet!
He thought, as he sat in the train, of trying to get out of A-Io: of going to Benbili, maybe. But he did not take the thought seriously. He would have to ride on a ship or airplane, he would be traced and stopped. The only place where he could get out of sight of his benevolent and protective hosts was in their own big city, under their noses.
It was not an escape. Even if he did get out of the country, be would still be locked in, locked in Urras. You couldn't call that escape, whatever the archists, with their mystique of national boundaries, might call it. But he suddenly felt cheerful, as he had not for days, when he thought that his benevolent and protective hosts might think, for a moment, that he had escaped.
It was the first really warm day of spring. The fields were green, and flashed with water. On the pasture lands each stock beast was accompanied by her young. The infant sheep were particularly charming, bouncing like white elastic balls, their tails going round and round. In a pen by himself the herd sire, ram or bull or stallion, heavynecked, stood potent as a thundercloud, charged with generation. Gulls swept over brimming ponds, white over
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blue, and white clouds brightened the pale blue sky. The branches of orchard trees were tipped with red, and a few blossoms were open, rose and white. Watching from the train window Shevek found his restless and rebellious mood ready to defy even the day's beauty. It was an unjust beauty. What had the Urrasti done to deserve it? Why was it given to them, so lavishly, so graciously, and so little, so very little, to his own people?
Fm thinking like an Urraati, he said to himself. Like a damned propertarian. As if deserving meant anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life! He tried to think of nothing at all, to let himself be borne forward and to watch the sunlight in the gentle sky and the little sheep bouncing in the fields of spring.