Leaving the Syndicate of Initiative shorn of its one conceivable claim to the attention of anybody on Anarres or Urras"
"I'm not leaving the Syndicate, Bedap."
Bedap lifted his head, and said after a minute, "No. I know you're not."
"All right Let's go to dinner. This belly growls: listen to it. Pilun, hear it? Rrowr, rrowrl"
"Hup!" Pilun said in a tone of command. Shevek picked her up and stood up, swinging her onto his shoulder. Behind his head and the child's, the single mobile hanging in this room oscillated slightly. It was a large piece made of wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disappeared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the two thin, clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval wires in complexly interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the common center, never quite meeting, never entirely parting. Takver called it the Inhabition of Time.
They went to the Pekesh commons, and waited till the registry board showed a sign-out, so they could bring Bedap in as a guest. His registering there signed him out at the commons where he usually ate, as the system was coordinated citywide by a computer. It was one of the highly mechanized "homeostatic processes" beloved by the eariy Settlers, which persisted only in Abbenay. Like the less
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elaborate arrangements used elsewhere, it never quite worked out; there were shortages, surpluses, and frustrations, but not major ones. Sign-outs at Pekesh commons were infrequent, as the kitchen was the best known in Abbenay. having a tradition of great cooks. An opening appeared at last, and they went in. Two young people whom Bedap knew slightly as dom neighbors of Shevek*s and Takver's joined them at table. Otherwise they were let alone—left alone. Which? It did not seem to matter.
They had a good dinner, a good time talking. But every BOW and then Bedap felt that around them there was a circle of silence.
"I don't know what the Urrasti will think up next," he said, and though he was speaking lightly he found himself, to his annoyance, lowering his voice. "They've asked to come here, and asked Shev to come there; what will the next move be?"
"I didn't know they'd actually asked Shev to go there,"
Takver said with a half frown.
"Yes, you did." Shevek said. "When they told me that they'd given me the prize, you know, the Seo Oen, they asked if I couldnt come, remember? To get the money that goes with ill" Shevek smiled, luminous. If there was a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he had alway been alone.
Thafs right. I did know that. It just didn't register as an actual possibility. You'd been talking for decads about suggesting in PDC that somebody might go to Urras, just to shock them."
That's what we finally did, this afternoon. Dap made me say it."
"Were they shocked?"
"Hair on end, eyes bulging—**
Takver giggled. Pilun sat in a high chair next to Shevek, exerdsinf her teeth on a piece of holum bread and her voice in song. "0 mathery bathery," she proclaimed, "ab-bery abbery babber dabi** Shevek, versatile, replied in the same vein. Adult conversation proceeded without intensity and with interruptions. Bedap did not mind, he had learned lonf ago that you took Shevek with complications or not at alL The most silent one of them all was Sadik.
Bedap stayed on with them for an hour after dinner in the pleasant, spacious common rooms of the domicile, and
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when he got up to go offered to accompany Sadik to her school dormitory, which was on his way. At this something happened, one of those events or signals obscure to those outside a family; all he knew was that Shevek, with no fuss or discussion, was coming along. Takver had to go feed Pflun, who was getting louder and louder. She kissed Bedap, and he and Shevek set off with Sadik, talking. They talked hard, and walked right past the learning center.
They turned back. Sadik had stopped before the dormitory entrance. She stood motionless, erect and slight, her face still, in the weak light of the street lamp. Shevek stood equally still for a moment, then went to her. "What is wrong, Sadik?"
The child said, "Shevek, may I stay in the room tonight?"
"Of course. But whafs wrong?"
Sadik'a delicate, long face quivered and seemed to fragment. "They dont like me, in the dormitory," she said, her voice becominf shrill with tension, but even softer than before.
They don't like you? What do you mean?"
They did not touch each other yet. She answered him with desperate courage. "Because they dont like—they don't like the Syndicate, and Bedap, and—and you. They call— The big sister in the dorm room, she said you—we were all tr— She said we were traitors," and saying the word the child jerked as if she had been shot, and Shevek caught her and held her. She held to him with all her strength, 'weeping in great gasping soba. She was too old, too tall for him to pick up. He stood holding her, stroking her hair. He looked over her dark head at Bedap. His own eye* were full of tears. He said, "It's all right. Dap. Goon."
There was nothing for Bedap to do but leave them there, the man and the child, in that one intimacy which he could not share, the hardest and deepest, the intimacy of pain. It gave him no sense of relief or escape to go;
rather he felt useless, diminished. "I am thirty-nine years old," he thought as he walked on towards his domicile, the five-man room where he lived in perfect independence.
"Forty in a few decada. What have I done? What have I been doing? Nothing. Meddling. Meddling in other people's lives because I don't have one. I never took the time.
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And the time's going to run out on me, all at once, and I will never have had . . . that." He looked back, down the long, quiet street, where the comer lamps made soft pools of light in the windy darkness, but he had gone too far to see the father and daughter, or they had gone. And what he meant by "that" he could not have said, good as he was with words; yet he felt that he understood it clearly. that all his hope was in that understanding, and that if he would be saved he must change his life.
When Sadik was calm enough to let go of him, Shevek left her litting on the front step of the dormitory, and went in to tell the vigilkeeper that she would be staying with the parents this night. The vigilkeeper spoke coldly to him. Adults who worked in children's dormitories had a natural tendency to disapprove of overnight dom visits, finding them disruptive; Shevek told himself he was probably mistaken in feeling anything more than such disapproval in the vigilkeeper. The halls of the learning center were brightly lit, ringing with noise, music practice, children's voices. There were all the old sounds, the smells, the shadows, the echoes of childhood which Shevek remembered, and with them the fears. One forgets the fears.
He came out and walked home with Sadik, his arm around her thin shoulders. She was silent, still struggling. She said abruptly as they came to their entry in the Pekesh main domicile, "I .know it isn't agreeable for you and Takver to have me overnight."
"Where did you get that idea?"
"Because you want privacy, adult couples need privacy." There's Pilun," he observed.
"Pilun doesn't count"
Neither do you."
She sniffled, attempting to smile.
When they came into the light of the room, however, her white, red-patched, puffy face at once startled Takver into saying, "Whatever is wrong?"—and Pilun, interrupted in sucking, startled out of bliss, began to howl, at which Sadik broke down again, and for a while it appeared that everyone was crying, and comforting each other, and refusing comfort. This sorted out quite suddenly into silence, Pilun on the mother's lap, Sadik on the father's.