He did not notice this. He was scarcely aware of them. He was aware of Anarres, ahead of him. He was aware of hope deceived and of the promise kept; of failure; and of the sources within his spirit, unsealed at last, of joy. He was a man released from jail, going home to his family. Whatever such a man sees along his way he sees only as reflections of the light
On the second day of the voyage he was in the communications room, talking with Anarres on the radio, first on the PDC wave length and now with the Syndicate of Initiative. He sat leaning forward, listening, or answering -with a spate of the clear, expressive language that was his native tongue, sometimes gesturing with his free hand as if his interlocutor could see him, occasionally laughing.
The first mate of the Davenant, a Hainishman named Ketho, controlling the radio contact, watched him
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thoughtfully. Ketho tad spent an hour after dinner the night before with Shevek, along with the commander and other crew members; he had asked—in a quiet, undemanding, Hainish way—a good many questions about Anarrea.
Shevek turned to him at last "AH right, done. The rest can wait till Fm home. Tomorrow they will contact you to arrange the entry procedure.'*
Ketho nodded. "You got some good news,** he said.
**Yes, I did. At least some, what do you call it, lively news." They had to speak lotic together; Shevek was more fluent in the language than Ketho, who spoke it very correctly and stiffly. The landing is going to be exciting," Shevek went on. "A lot of enemies and a lot of friends will be there. The good news is the friends. ... It seems there are more of them than when I left."
'This danger of attack, when you land,** Ketho said.
"Surety the officers of the Port of Anarres feel that they can control the dissidents? They would not deliberately tell you to come down and be murdered?"
"Wefl. they are going to protect me. But I am also a dissident, after alL I asked to take. the risk. That's my privilege, you see. as an Odonian." He smiled at Ketho.
The Hainishman did not smile back; his face was serious.
He was a handsome man of about thirty, tall and lightskinned like a Cetian, but nearly hairless like a Terran, with very strong, fine features.
"I am glad to be able to share it with you," he said. "I will be taking you down in the landing craft"
"Good," Shevek said. "It isn't everyone who would care to accept our privuegesi"
"More than you think, perhaps,** Ketbo said. **If you would allow them to."
Shevek, whose mind had not been fully on the conversation, had been about to leave; this stopped him. He looked at Ketho, and after a moment said, **Do you mean that you would like to land witk me?"
The Hainishman answered with equal directness, "Yes,
I would."
"Would the commander permit it?"
"Yes. As an officer of a mission ship, in fact, it is part of my duty to explore and investigate a new world when possible. The commander and I have spoken of the pos-
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sibility. We discussed it with our ambassadors before we left. Their feeling was that no formal request should be made, since your peopled policy is to forbid foreigners to land."
*'Hm," Shevek said, noncommittal. He went over to the far wall and stood for a while in front of a picture, a Hainish landscape, very simple and subtle, a dark river flowing among reeds under a heavy sky. "The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement of Anarres," he said, "do not permit Urrasti to land, except inside the boundary of the Port. Those terms still are accepted. But you're not an Urrasti."
"When Anarres was settled, there were no other races known. By implication, those terms include all foreigners.*'
"So our managers decided, sixty years ago, when your people first came into this solar system and tried to talk with us. But I think they were wrong. They were just building more walls." He turned around and stood, his hands behind his back, looking at the other man. "Why do you want to land, Ketho?"
"I want to see Anarres,** the Hainishman said. "Even before you came to Urras, I was curious about it. It began when I read Odo's works. I became very interested. I have—" He hesitated, as if embarrassed, but continued in his repressed, conscientious way, "I have learned a little Pravic. Not much yet"
"It is your own wish. then—your own initiative?"
"Entirely."
"And you understand that it might be dangerous?"
"Yes."
"Things are ... a little broken loose, on Anarres. That's what my friends on the radio have been telling me about.
It was our purpose all along—our Syndicate, this journey of mine—to shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchistsl All this has been going on while I was gone.
So, you see, nobody is quite sure what happens next. And
if you land with me, even more gets broken loose. I cannot push too far. I cannot take you as an official representative of some foreign government That will not do, on Anarres."
"I understand that."
"Once you are there, once you walk through the wall
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with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become aa Anarresti, with the same options as all die others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe." He looked around the tranquil, orderly room, with its simple consoles and delicate instruments, its high ceiling and windowless walls, and back at Ketho. *'You would find yourself very much alone," he said.
**My race is very old," Ketho said. "We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But i have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?"
"We are the children of time," Shevek said, in Pravic.
The younger man looked at him a moment, and then repeated the words in lotic: "We are the children of time."
**AU right." Shevek said, and laughed. "All right, am-marl You had better call Anarres on the radio again—the Syndicate, first ... I said to Keng, the ambassador, that I had nothing to give in return for what her people and yours have done for me; well, maybe I can give you something in return. An idea, a promise, a risk...."
"I shall speak to the commander," Ketho said, as grave as ever, but with a very slight tremor in his voice of excitement, of hope.
Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the Davenanfs garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. Shevek stood at the high, cleared view port, looking at the night side of Anarres, a dark curve across half the stars. He was wondering if Takver would be there, at the Port. She had not yet arrived in Abbenay from Peace-and-Plenty when he last talked with Bedap, so he had left it to Bedap to discuss and decide with her whether it would be wise for her to come out to the Port. ''You don't think I could stop her even if it wasn't?" Bedap had said. He wondered also what
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kind of ride she might have got from the Sorruba coast; a
dirigible, he hoped, if she had brought the girls along. Train riding was hard, with children. He still recalled the discomforts of the trip from Chakar to Abbenay, in '68, when Sadik had been trainsick for three mortal days.