shop or the radio tower, don't have postings, and so we
don't see much of people outside the Syndicate of Initiative. I'm at PDC a lot, but that's a special situation, I expect opposition there because I create it What is it mat you run up against?"
"Hatred," Takver said, in her dark, soft voice. 'Tteal hatred. The director of my project won't speak to me any more. Well, that's not much loss. He's a stick anyhow.,
But some of the others do tell me what they think. . . . There's a woman, not at the fish labs, here in the dom. I'm on the block sanitation committee and I had to go speak to her about something. She wouldn't let me talk. *Doa'f you try to come into this room, I know you, you damned traitors, you intellectuals, you egoizers' and so on and so
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on, and then slammed the door. It was grotesque." Takver laughed without humor. Pilun, seeing her laugh, smiled as she sat curled in the angle of Bedap's arm, and then yawned. "But you know, it was frightening. I'm a coward,
Dap. I don't like violence. I don't even like disapproval!"
"Of course not. The only security we have is our neighbors* approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can't 'break' a custom; it's the framework of your life with other people. We're only just beginning to feel what it's like to be revolutionaries, as Shev put it in the meeting today. And it isnt comfortable."
"Some people understand," Takver said with determined optimism. "A woman on the omnibus yesterday, I don't know where I'd met her, tenth-day work some time, I suppose; she said, *It must be wonderful to live with a great scientist, it must be so interestingi' And I said, *Yea» at least there's always something to talk about*.. . . Pilun, don't go to sleep, babyl Shevek will be home soon and well go to commons. Jiggle her. Dap. Well, anyway, you gee, she knew who Sbev was, but she wasn't hateful or disapproving, she was very nice."
"People do know who he is," Bedap said. "It's funny, because they cant understand his books any more than I can. A few hundred do, he thinks. Those students in the Divisional Institutes who try to organize Simultaneity courses. I think a few dozen would be a liberal estimate, myself. And yet people know of him, they have tlys feeling he's something to be proud of. That's one thing the Syndicate has done, I suppose, if nothing else. Printed Shev's books. It may be the only wise thing we've done."
"Oh, now! You must have had a bad session at PDO today."
"We did. I'd like to cheer you up. Takver. but I can't The Syndicate is cutting awfully close to the basic societal bond, the fear of the stranger. There was a young fellow there today openly threatening violent reprisal. Well, it's a poor option, but he*U find others ready to take it. And that Rulag, by damn, she's a formidable opponenti"
"You know who she is. Dap?'*
"Who she is?"
"Shev never told you? Well, he doesnt talk about her.
She's the mother."
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-Shev's mother?"
Takver nodded. "She left when he was two. The father stayed with him. Nothing unusual, of course. Except Shev's feelings. He feels that he lost something essential—he and the father both. He doesn't make a general principle out of it, that parents should always keep the children, or anything. But the importance loyalty has for him, it goes back to that, I flunk.**
"What's unusual," said Bedap energetically, oblivious of Pilun, who had gone sound asleep on his lap, "distinctly unusual, is her feelings about himi She's been waiting for him to come to an Import-Export meeting, you could tell, today. She knows he's the soul of the group, and she hates us because of him. Why? Guilt? Has the Odonian Society gone so rotten we're motivated by guilt? . . . You know, now that I know it, they look alike. Only in her, it's all gone hard, rock-hard—dead.'*
The door opened as he was speaking. Shevek and Sadik came in. Sadik was ten years old, tall for her age and thin. all long legs, supple and fragile, with a cloud of dark hair. Behind her came Shevek; and Bedap, looking at him in the curious new light of his kinship with Rulag, saw him as one occasionally sees a very old friend, with a vividness to which all the past contributes: the splendid reticent face, ful* of life but worn down, worn to the bone. It was an intensely individual face, and yet the features were not only like Rulag's but like many others among the Anar-resti, a people selected by a vision of freedom, and adapted to a barren world, a world of distances, silences, desolations.
In the room, meantime, much closeness, commotion, communion: greetings, laughter, Pilun being passed around, rather crossly on her part, to be hugged, the bottle being passed around to be poured, questions, conversations. Sadik was the center first, because she was the least often there of the family; then Shevek. "What did old Greasy Beard want?"
"Were you at the Institute?" Takver asked, examining him as he sat beside her.
"Just went by there. Sabul left me a note this morning at the Syndicate." Shevek drank off his fruit mice and lowered the cup, revealing a curious set to his mouth, a
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nonexpression. "He said the Physics Federation has a fulltime posting to fill. Autonomous, permanent."
"For you, you mean? There? At the Institute?"
He nodded,
"Sabul told you?**
*'He's trying to enlist you," Bedap said.
"Yes, I think so. H you cant uproot it, domesticate it, as we used to say in Northsetting." Shevek suddenly and spontaneously laughed. "It is funny, isn*t it?** he said.
'•No," said Takver. "It isn*t funny. It's disgusting. How could you go talk to him, even? After all the slander he*a spread about you, and the lies about the Principles being stolen from him, and not telling you that the Urrasd gave you that prize, and then Just last year, when he got those kids who organized the lecture series broken up and seat away because of your *crypto-authoritarian influence* over them—you an authoritarian!—that was sickening, unforgivable. How can you be civil to a man like that?"
"Well, it isnt all Sabul, you know. He's just a spokesman."
"I know, but he loves to be the spokesman. And he's been so squalid for so long! Well, what did you say to him?"
"I temporized—as you might say," Shevek said, and laughed again. Takver glanced at him again, knowing now that he was, for all his control, in a state of extreme tension or excitement.
"You didn't turn him down flat, then?"
"I said that I'd resolved some years ago to accept no regular work postings, so long as I was able to do theoretical work. So he said that since it was an autonomous post Fd be completely free to go on with the research Fd been doing, and the purpose of giving me the post was to —let's see how he put it—to facilitate access to experimental equipment at the Institute, and to the regular channels of publication and dissemination.' The PDC press, in other words."
**Why, then you've won," Takver said, looking at him with a queer expression. "You've won. They'll print what you write. It's what you wanted when we came back here five years ago. The walls are down,"
"There are walls behind the walls," Bedap said.
"I've won only if I accept the posting. Sabul is offering
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to ... legalize me. To make roe official. In order to dissociate me from the Syndicate of Initiative. Don't you see that as his motive. Dap?"
"Of course," Bedap said. His face was somber. "Divide to weaken."
"But to take Shev back into the Institute, and print what he writes on the PDC press, is to give implied approval to the whole Syndicate, isn't it?"
"It ought mean that to most people," Shevek said.
**No, it won't," Bedap said. "Itll be explained. The great physicist was misled by a disaffected group, for a while. Intellectuals are always being led astray, because they think about irrelevant things like time and space and reality, things that have nothing to do with real life, so they are easily fooled by wicked deviationists. But the good Odonians at the Institute gently showed him his errors and he has returned to the path of social-organic truth.