No more adequate response occurring to Shevek through his headache, he reached out and took Kimoe's hand, saying, "Then let's meet again, brother!" Kimoe gave his hand a nervous shake, Urrasti style, and hurried out After he was gone Shevek realized he had spoken to him in Pravic, called him ammar, brother, in a language Kimoe did not understand.
15
The wall speaker was Matting orders. Strapped into the bunk, Shevek listened, feeling hazy and detached. The sensations of entry thickened the haze; he was conscious of little but a profound hope he would not have to vomit He did not know they had landed tin Kimoe came hurrying in again and rushed him out to the officers' lounge. The viewscreen where Urras had hung cloud-coiled and luminous so long was blank. The room was full of people.
Where had they all come from? He was surprised and pleased by his ability to stand up, walk, and shake hands.
He concentrated on that much, and let meaning pass him by. Voices, smiles, hands, words, names. His name again and again: Dr. Shevek, Dr. Shevek. . . . Now he and all the strangers arouad him were going down a covered ramp, all the voices very loud, words echoing off the walls. The clatter of voices thinned. A strange air touched his face.
He looked up, and as he stepped off the ramp onto the level ground he stumbled and nearly fell. He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning of a step and its completion, and at the end of the step he stood on a new-earth.
A broad, grey evening was around him. Blue lights, mist-blurred, burned far away across a foggy field. The air on his face and hands, in his nostrils and throat
and lungs, was cool, damp, many-scented, mild. It was not strange. It was the air of the world from which his race had come, it was the air of home.
Someone had taken his arm when he stumbled. Lights flashed on him. Photographers were filming the scene for the news: The First Man from the Moon: a tall, frail figure in a crowd of dignitaries and professors and security agents, the fine shaggy head held very erect (so that the photographers could catch every feature) as if he were trying to look above the floodlights into the sky. the broad sky of fog that hid the stars, the Moon, all other worlds. Journalists tried to crowd through the rings of policemen: "Will you give us a statement. Dr. Shevek, in this historic moment?" They were forced back again at once. The men around him urged him forward. He was borne off to the waiting limousine, eminently photograph-able to the last because of his height, his long hair, and the strange look of grief and recognition on his face.
16
The towers of the city went up into mist, great ladders of blurred light. Trains passed overhead, bright shrieking streaks. Massive walls of stone and glass fronted the streets above the race of cars and trolleys. Stone, steel, glass, electric light No faces.
"This is ?0 Esseia, Dr. Shevek. But it was decided it would be better to keep you out of the city crowds just at first. We're going straight on to the University."
There were five men with him in the dark, softly padded body of the car. They pointed out landmarks, but in the fog he could not tell which great vague, fleeting building was the High Court and which the National Museum, which the Directorate and which the Senate. They crossed a river or estuary; the million lights of Nio Esseia, fog-diffused, trembled on dark water, behind them. The road darkened, the fog thickened, the driver slowed the vehicle's pace. Its lights shone on the mist ahead as if on a wall that kept retreating before them. Shevek sat leaning forward a little, gazing out. His eyes were not focused, nor was his mind, but he looked aloof and grave, and the other men talked quietly, respecting his silence.
What was the thicker darkness that flowed along endlessly by the road? Trees? Could they have been driving, ever since they left the city, among trees? The lotic word came into his mind: "forest" They would not come out suddenly into the desert. The trees went on and on, on the next hillside and the next and the next standing in the bweet chul of the fog, endless, a forest all over the world, a still striving interplay of lives, a dark movement of leaves in the night Then as Shevek sat marveling as the car came up out of the fog of the river valley into clearer air, there looked at him from the darkness under the road-bide foliage, for one instant, a face.
It was not like any human face. It was as long as his arm. and ghastly white. Breath jetted in vapor from what must be nostrils, and terrible, unmistakable, there was an eye. A large, dark eye, mournful, perhpas cynical? gone
in the flash of the car's lights.
"What was that?"
-Donkey, wasn't it?"
"An animal?"
"Yes, an animal. By God, that's right! You have no large animals on Anarres, have you?"
17
"A donkey's a kind of horse." said another of the men, and another, in a firm, elderly voice, 'That was a horse.
Donkeys don't come that size." They wanted to talk with him, but Shevek was not listening again. He was thinking of Takver. He wondered what that deep, dry, dark gaze out of the darkness would have meant to Takver. She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary. Takver would have known how to look back at that eye in the darkness under the trees.
"There's leu Eun ahead. There's quite a crowd waiting to meet you. Dr. Shevek; the President, and several Directors, and the Chancellor, of course, all kinds of bigwigs.
But if you're tired we'll get the amenities over with as soon as possible."
The amenities lasted several hours. He never could remember them clearly afterward. He was propelled from the small dark box of the car into a huge bright box full of people—hundreds of people, under a golden ceiling hung with crystal lights. He was introduced to all the people.
They were all shorter than he was, and bald. The few
•women there were bald even on their heads; he realized
'at last that they must shave off all their hair, the very fine,
soft, short body hair of his race, and the head hair as
•well. But they replaced it with marvelous clothing, gorgeous in cut and color, the women in full gowns that swept the floor, their breasts bare, their waists and necks and heads adorned with jewelry and lace and gauze, the men jn trousers and coats or tunics of red, blue, violet, gold, green, with slashed sleeves and cascades of lace, or long gowns of crimson or dark green or black that parted at the knee to show the white stockings, silver-gartered. Another lotic word floated into Shevek's head, one he had never had a referent for, though he liked the sound of it:
"'splendor." These people had splendor. Speeches were made. The President of the Senate of the Nation of A-Io, a man with strange, cold eyes, proposed a toast: "To the hew era of brotherhood between the Twin Planets, and to the harbinger of that new era, our distinguished and most welcome guest. Dr. Shevek of Anarres!" The Chancellor of the University talked to him charmingly, the First Director of the nation talked to him seriously, he was in-
18
troduced to ambassadors, astronauts, physicists, politicians, dozens of people, all of whom had long titles and honorifics both before and after their names, and they talked to him, and he answered them, but he had no memory later of what anyone had said, least of all himself. Very late at night he found himself with a small group of men walking in the warm rain across a large park or Square. There was the springy feeling of live grass underfoot; he recognized it from having walked in the Triangle Park in Abbenay. That vivid memory and the cool vast touch of the night wind awakened him. His soul came out of hiding.