It was past lights-out in the children's dormitory, and many adults were already in bed, though lights were on here and there in the domiciles. The street was empty.
The boys careened down it laughing and calling to one another, wild with the pleasure of sharing a secret, of disturbing others, of compounding wickednesses. They woke up half the children in the dormitory with games of tag down the halls and among the beds. No adult interfered; the tumult died down presently.
Tirin and Shevek sat up whispering together for a long time on Tirin's bed. They decided that Kadagv had asked for it, and would get two full nights in prison.
Their group met in the afternoon at the lumber recycling workshop, and the foreman asked where Kadagv was. Sbevek exchanged a glance with Tirin. He felt clever. he felt a sense of power, in not replying. Yet when Tirin replied coolly that he must have joined another group for the day, Shevek was shocked by the lie. His sense of secret power suddenly made him uncomfortable: his legs itched, his ears felt hot. When the foreman spoke to him he jumped with alarm, or fear, or some such feeling, a feeling he had never had before, something like embarrassment but worse than that: inward, and vile. He kept thinking about Kadagv, as he plugged and sanded nail
31
holes in three-ply hohim boards and sanded the boards back to silky smoothness- Every time he looked into his mind there was Kadagv in it It was disgusting.
Gibesh, who had been standing guard duty, came to
Tirin and Shevek after dinner, looking uneasy. "I thought
1 heard Kad saying something in there. In a sort of funny voice."
There was a pause. 'Well let him out,** Shevek said.
Tirin turned on him. "Come on, Shev, don't go mushy
on us. Don't get altruistici Let him finish it out and respect
himself at the end of it**
**Altruistic, hell. I want to respect myself,** Shevek said, and set off for the learning center. Tirin knew him; he wasted no more time arguing with him, but followed. The eleven-year-olds trailed along behind. They crawled under the building to the cell. Shevek knocked one wedge free,
Tirin the other. The door of the prison fell outward with a flat thump.
Kadagv was lying on the ground, curled up on his side.
He sat up, then got up very slowly and came out. He stooped more than necessary under the low roof, and blinked a lot in the light of the lantern, but looked no different from usual. The smell that came out with him was unbelievable. He had suffered, from whatever cause, from diarrhea. There was a mess in the cell, and smears of yellow fecal stuff on his shirt When he saw this in the lantern light he made an effort to hide it with his hand, Nobody said anything much.
When they had crawled out from under the building and were heading around to the dormitory, Kadagv asked,
"How long was it?"
"About thirty hours, counting the first four."
"Pretty long," Kadagv said without conviction.
After getting him to the baths to clean up, Shevek went off at a run to the latrine. There he leaned over a bowl and vomited. The spasms did not leave him for a quarter of an hour. He was shaky and exhausted when they passed.
He went to the dormitory common room, read some physics, and went to bed early. None of the five boys ever went back to the prison under the learning center.
None of them ever mentioned the episode, except Gibesh. who boasted about it once to some older boys and girls;
but they did not understand, and he dropped the subject
32
The Moon stood high over the Northsetting Regional Institute of the Noble and Material Sciences. Four boys of fifteen or sixteen sat on a hilltop between patches of scratchy ground-holum and looked down at the Regional Institute and up at the Moon.
"Peculiar," said Tirin. "I never thought before.. .*'
Comments from the other three on the self-evidence of this remark.
"I never thought before," said Tirin unruffled, "of the fact that there are people sitting on a hill, up there, on
Urras, looking at Anarres, at us, and saying, 'Look, there's the Moon.' Our earth is their Moon; our Moon is their earth."
"Where, then, is Truth?" declaimed Bedap, and yawned.
"In the hill one happens to be sitting on," said Tirin.
They all went on staring up at the brilliant, blurry turquoise, which was not quite round, a day past its full. The northern ice cap was dazzling. "It's clear in the north,** Shevek said. "Sunny. That's A-Io, that brownish bulge there."
"They're all lying around naked in the sun," said Kvetur, "with Jewels in their navels, and no hair."
There was a silence.
They had come up to the hilltop for masculine company.
The presence of females was oppressive to them all. It seemed to them that lately the world was full of girls. Everywhere they looked, waking or asleep, they saw giris. They had all tried copulating with girls; some of them in despair had also tried not copulating with girls. It made no difference. The girls were there.
Three days ago in a class on the History of the Odonian Movement they had all seen the same visual lesson, and the image of iridescent jewels in the smooth hollow of women's oiled, brown bellies had since recurred to all of them, privately.
They had also seen the corpses of children, hairy like themselves, stacked up like scrap metal, stiff and rusty, on a beach, and men pouring oil over the children and lighting it. "A famine in Bachifofl Province in the Nation of Thu," the commenter's voice had said. "Bodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches.
On the beaches of Tins, seven hundred kilometers away in the Nation of A-Io (and here came the jeweled navels),
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women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class (the lotic words were used, as there was no equivalent for either word in Pravic) lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class." A close-up of dinnertiroe: soft mouths champing and smiling, smooth hands reaching out for delicacies wetly mounded in silver bowls. Then a switch back to the blind, blunt face of a dead child, mouth open, empty, black, dry. "Side by side," the quiet voice had said,
But the image that had risen like an oily iridescent bubble in the boys' minds was all the same.
"How old are those films?" said Tirin, "Are they from before the Settlement, or are they contemporary? They never say."
"What does it matter?" Kvetur said. "They were living like that on Urras before the Odonian Revolution. The Odonians all got out and came here to Anarres. So prob-
ably nothing's changed—they're still at it, there." He pointed to the great blue-green Moon.
"How do we know they are?"
"What do you mean, Tir?" asked Shevek.
"H those pictures are a hundred and fifty years old, things could be entirely different now on Urras. I don't say they are, but if they were, how would we know it?
We don't go there, we dont talk, there's no communication. We really have no idea what life's like on Urraa now."
"People in PDC do. They talk to the Urrasti that man the freighters that come in at Port of Anarres. They keep informed. They have to, so we can keep up trade with Urras, and know how much of a threat they pose to us, too.'* Bedap spoke reasonably, but Tirin's reply was sharp:
"Then PDC may be informed, but we're not."
"Informedl" Kvetur said. "I've heard about Urras ever
since nurseryl I don't care if I never see another picture of
foul Urrasti cities and greasy Urrasti bodiesi"
"That's just it," said Tirin with the glee of one following logic. **AU the material on Urras available to students is the same. Disgusting, unmoral, excremental. But look.
H it was that bad when the Settlers left, how has it kept on going for a hundred and fifty years? If they were so sick, why aren't they dead? Why haven't their propertarian societies collapsed? What are we so afraid of?"