The boy was volunteering for a famine-prevention posting.
He was full of noble feelings, spflling over with brotherhood, adventurousness, hope. He was delighted to be going off on his own, leaving his childhood behind. He talked a great deal, like a child, in a voice not yet used to its deeper tones. Freedom, freedom! rang in his excited talk, in every word; and the old man's voice grumbled and rumbled through it, teasing but not threatening, mocking but not cautioning. Freedom, the ability to go somewhere and do something, freedom was what the old man praised and cherished in the young one, even while he mocked his self-importance. Shevek listened to them with pleasure. They broke the morning's series of grotesques.
As soon as Shevek explained where he wanted to go, the clerk got a worried look, and went off for an atlas, which she opened on the counter between them. "Now look," she said. She was an ugly little woman with buck teeth; her bands on the colored pages of the atlas were deft and soft. "That's Rolny, see, the peninsula sticking down into the North Temaenian. It's just a huge sandpit There's nothing on it at all but the marine laboratories away out there at the end, see? Then the coast's all swamp and salt marsh till you get clear round here to Harmony —a thousand kilometers. And west of it is the Coast Barrens. The nearest you could get to Rolny would be some town in the mountains. But they're not asking for emergency postings there; they're pretty self-sufficing. Of course, you could go there anyhow," she added in a slightly different tone.
"It's too far from Rolny," he said, looking at the map,
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noticing in the mountains of Northeast the little isolated town where Takver had grown up. Round Valley. "Don't they need a janitor at the marine lab? A statistician? Somebody to feed the fish?"
"I'll check."
The human/computer network of ffles in Divlab was set up with admirable efficiency. It did not take the clerk five minutes to get the desired information sorted out from the enormous, continual input and outgo of infor-
mation concerning every job being done, every position wanted, every workman needed, and the priorities of each in the general economy of the world-wide society.
"They just filled an emergency draft—that's the partner, isn't it? They got everybody they wanted, four technicians and an experienced seiner. Staff complete."
Shevek leaned his elbows on the counter and bowed his head, scratching it, a gesture of confusion and defeat masked by self-consciousness. "Well," he said, "I don't know what to do."
"Look, brother, how long is the partner's posting?" "Indefinite."
"But it's a famine-prevention job, isn't it? It's not going to go on like this forever. It can'tl It'll rain, this winter."
He looked up into his sister's earnest, sympathetic, harried face. He smiled a little, for he could not leave her effort to give hope without response.
"You'll get back together. Meanwhile—*'
"Yes. Meanwhile," he said.
She awaited his decision.
It was his to make; and the options were endless. He could stay in Abbenay and organize classes in physics if he could find volunteer students. He could go to Rolny Peninsula and live with Takver though without any place in the research station. He could live anywhere and do nothing but get up twice a day and go to the nearest commons to be fed. He could do what he pleased.
The identity of the words "work" and "play" in Pravic had, of course, a strong ethical significance. Odo had seen the danger of a rigid moralism arising from the use of the word "work" in her analogic system: the cells must work together, the optimum working of the organism, the work done by each element, and so forth. Cooperation and function, essential concepts of the Analogy, both im-
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plied work. The proof of an experiment, twenty test tubes in a laboratory or twenty million people on the Moon, is simply, does it work? Odo had seen the moral trap. "The saint is never busy," she had said, perhaps wistfully.
But the choices of the social being are never made alone.
"Well," Shevek said, "I Just came back from a famine-prevention posting. Anything else like that need doing?'*
The clerk gave him an elder-sisterly look, incredulous but forgiving. 'There's about seven hundred Urgent calls posted around the room," she said. "Which one would you like?"
"Any of them need math?"
'They're mostly farming and skilled labor. Do yon have any engineering training?"
"Not much."
"Well, there's work-coordinating. That certainly takes a head for figures. How about this one?"
"All right."
"That's down in Southwest, in the Dust, you know."
"I've been in the Dust before. Besides, as you say, someday it will rain. .. .*'
She nodded, smiling, and typed onto his Divlab record:
FROM Abbenay, NW Cent lust Sci, TO Elbow, SW. wk co, phosphate mill #1: EMERG PSTG: 5-1-3-165— indefinite.
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s
Chapter 9
Shevek was awakened by the bells in the chapel tower pealing the Prime Harmony for morning religious service.
Each note was like a blow on the back of his head. He was so sick and shaky he could not even sit up for a long time. He finally managed to shuffle into the bathroom and take a long cold bath, which relieved the headache; but his whole body continued to fed strange to him—to feel, somehow, vile. As he began to'-be able to think again, fragments and moments of the night/ before came into his' mind, vivid, senseless little scenes frdpa the party at Vea's. He tried not to think about them, *nd then could think of nothing else. Everything, everytliing became vile. He' sat down at his desk, and sat th^re staring, motionless, perfectly miserable, for half an hour.
He had been embarrassed often enough, and had felt himself a fool. As a young man he had suffered from tho sense that others thought him strange, unlike them; in later years he had felt, having deliberately invited, the anger and contempt of many of his fellows on Anarres. But he had never really accepted their Judgment. He had never been ashamed.
He did not know that this paralyzing humiliation was 8 chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache. Nor
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would the knowledge have made much difference to him.
Shame—the sense of vileness and of self-estrangement—^ was a revelation. He saw with a new clarity, a hideous clarity; and saw far past those incoherent memories of the
end of the evening at Vea's. It was not only poor Vea who had betrayed him. It was not only the alcohol that he had tried to vomit up; it was all the bread he had eaten on Urras.
He leaned his elbows on the desk and put his head in his hands, pressing in on the temples, the cramped position of pain; and he looked at his life in the light of shame.
On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebeclass="underline" to risk the self for the Bake of society.
Here on Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a selfindulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.
On his first night in this room be had asked them, challenging and curious, "What are you going to do with me?" He knew now what they had done with him.
Chifoilisk had told him the simple fact. They owned him.
He had thought to bargain with them, a very naive anarchist's notion. The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.