"I don't know. It ought to, of course. But even before the famine it wasnt going in that direction, but away from It Bedap was right: every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic
machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this ia the way it was done, this is the way it is done, this is the
way it has to be done.... There was a lot of that, before
the drought Five years of stringent control may have fixed the pattern permanently. Don't look so skepticall Listen, you tell me, how many people do you know who refused to accept a posting—even before the famine?"
Takver considered the question. "Leaving out nuchniU?**
"No, no. Nuchnibi are important."
"Well, several of Dap's friends—that nice composer,
Salas, and some of the scruffy ones too. And real nuctmibi used to come through Round Valley when I was a kid.
Only they cheated, I always thought They told such lovely lies and stories, and told fortunes, everybody was glad to see them and keep them and feed them as long as they'd {stay. But they never would stay long. But then people
264
would Just pick up and leave town, kids usually, some of them just hated farm work. and they'd just quit their posting and leave. People do that everywhere, all the time. They move on, looking for something better. You just don't call it refusing postingi"
•*Why not?"
"What are you getting at?" Takver grumbled, retiring further under the blanket.
"Well, this. That we're ashamed to say we've refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don't cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor's opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don't believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he's a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminall We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it We've made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can't see them, because they're part of our thinking. Tir never did that I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian—a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for •his first free act."
"I don't think," Takver said, muffled in the bed, and defensively, "that Tir was a very strong person."
*'No, he was extremely vulnerable."
There was a long silence.
"No wonder he haunts you," she said. "His play. Your book." "But rm luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn't himself, it's merely the impersonal truth. An artist can't hide behind the truth. He can't hide anywhere."
Takver watched him from the comer of her eye for
some time, then turned over and sat up, pulling the blanket
up around her shoulders. "Brr! It's cold. ... I was wrong.
wasn't I, about the book. About letting Sabiri cut it up and
put his name on it. It seemed right It seemed like setting
the work before the workman, pride before vanity, com-
265
munity before ego, all that. But it wasn't really that at all, was it? It was a capitulation. A surrender to SabuTs authoritarianism."
"I don't know. It did get the thing printed."
'The right end, but the wrong meansi I thought about ft for a long time, at Rolny, Shev. Ill tell you what was wrong. I was pregnant. Pregnant women have no ethics.
Only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse. To hell with the book, and the partnership, and the truth, if they threaten the precious fetus! It's a racial preservation drive, but it can work right against community; it's biological, not social. A man can be grateful he never gets into the grip of it. But he'd better realize than a woman can, and watch out for it. I think that's why the old archisms used women as property. Why did the women let them? Because they were pregnant all the time—because they were already possessed, enslaved!"
"All right, maybe, but our society, here, is a true community wherever it truly embodies Odo's ideas. It was a woman who made the Promise! What are you doing— indulging guilt feelings? Wallowing?" The word he used was not "wallowing," there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally "coating continually and thickly with excrement." The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vndd metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.
"Well, no. It was lovely, having Sadiki But I was wrong about the book."
"We were both wrong. We always go wrong together.
You don't really think you made up my mind for me?"
"In that case I think I did."
"No. The fact is, neither of us made up our mind.
Neither of us chose. We let Sabul choose for us. Our own, internalized Sabul—convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being freel Well, never again. I learn slowly, but I learn."
"What are you going to do?" asked Takver, a thrill of agreeable excitement in her voice.
"Go to Abbenay with you and start a syndicate, a printing syndicate. Print the Principles, uncut And whatever else we like. Bedap's Sketch of Open Education in
Science, that the PDC wouldn't circulate. And Tirin's play.
I owe him that He taught me what prisons are, and who
266
builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners.
Fin going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls."
"It may get pretty drafty," Takver said, huddled in blankets. She leaned against bim, and he put his arm around her shoulders. "I expect it will," he said.
Long after Takver had faDen asleep that night Shevek lay awake, his hands under his head, looking into darkness. hearing silence. He thought of his long trip out of the Dust, remembering the levels and mirages of the desert, the train driver with the bald, brown head and candid eyes, wto had said that one must work with time and not against it
Shevek had learned something about his own will these last four years. In its frustration he had learned its strength. No social or ethical imperative equaled it. Not even hunger could repress it The less he had, the more absolute became his need to be.
He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his "cellular function,** the analogic term for the individual's individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo's Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; ;ust the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.
All this Shevek had thought out, in these terms, for his conscience was a completely Odonian one.