“All right. I agree that it’s probably wise to fear Urras. But why hate? Hate’s not functional; why are we taught it? Could it be that if we knew what Urras was really like, we’d like it — some of it — some of us? That what PDC wants to prevent is not just some of them coming here, but some of us wanting to go there?”
“Go to Urras?” Shevek said, startled.
They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed. “Who’d ever want to go to Urras?” he demanded. “What for?”
“To find out what another world’s like. To see what a ‘horse’ is!”
“That’s childish,” Kvetur said. “There’s life on some other star systems,” and he waved a hand at the moon-washed sky, “so they say. What of it? We had the luck to be born here!”
“If we’re better than any other human society,” said Tirin, “then we ought to be helping them. But we’re forbidden to.”
“Forbidden? Nonorganic word. Who forbids? You’re externalizing the integrative function itself,” Shevek said, leaning forward and speaking with intensity. “Order is not ‘orders.’ We don’t leave Anarres, because we are Anarres. Being Tirin, you can’t leave Tirin’s skin. You might like to try being somebody else to see what it’s like, but you can’t. But are you kept from it by force? Are we kept here by force? What force — what laws, governments, police? None. Simply our own being, our nature as Odonians. It’s your nature to be Tirin, and my nature to be Shevek, and our common nature to be Odonians, responsible to one another. And that responsibility is our freedom. To avoid it, would be to lose our freedom. Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”
“Oh, hell, no. Can’t I talk? The trouble with you, Shev, is you don’t say anything till you’ve saved up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments, and then you dump them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap—”
Shevek sat back, looking vindicated.
But Bedap, a heavy-set, square-faced fellow, chewed on his thumbnail and said, “All the same, Tir’s point remains. It would be good to know that we knew all the truth about Urras.”
“Who do you think is lying to us?” Shevek demanded.
“Placid, Bedap met his gaze. “Who, brother? Who but ourselves?”
The sister planet shone down upon them, serene and brilliant, a beautiful example of the improbability of the real.
The afforestation of the West Temaenian Littoral was one of the great undertakings of the fifteenth decad of the Settlement on Anarres, employing nearly eighteen thousand people over a period of two years.
Though the long beaches of Southeast were fertile, supporting many fishing and farming communities, the arable area was a mere strip along the sea. Inland and westward clear across the vast plains of Southwest the land was uninhabited except for a few isolated mining towns. It was the region called the Dust.
In the previous geological era the Dust had been an immense forest of holums, the ubiquitous, dominant plant genus of Anarres. The current climate was hotter and drier. Millennia of drought had killed the trees and dried the soil to a fine grey dust that now rose up on every wind, forming hills as pure of line and barren as any sand dune. The Anarresti hoped to restore the fertility of that restless earth by replanting the forest. This was, Shevek thought, in accordance with the principle of Causative Reversibility, ignored by the Sequency school of physics currently respectable on Anarres, but still an intimate, tacit element of Odonian thought. He would like to write a paper showing the relationship of Odo’s ideas to the ideas of temporal physics, and particularly the influence of Causative Reversibility on her handling of the problem of ends and means. But at eighteen he didn’t know enough to write such a paper, and he never would know enough if he didn’t get back to physics soon and out of the damned Dust.
At night in the project camps everybody coughed. In the daytime they coughed less; they were too busy to cough. The dust was their enemy, the fine dry stuff that clogged the throat and lungs; their enemy and their charge, their hope. Once that dust had lain rich and dark in the shade of trees. After their long work, it might do so again.
Gimar was always humming the tune, and now in the hot evening returning to camp over the plain she sang the words aloud.
“Who does? Who’s ‘she’?” asked Shevek.
Gimar smiled. Her broad, silky face was smeared and caked with dust, her hair was full of dust, she smelled strongly and agreeably of sweat.
“I grew up in Southrising,” she said. “Where the miners are. It’s a miner song.”
“What miners?”
“Don’t you know? People who were already here when the Settlers came. Some of them stayed and joined the solidarity. Goldminers, tinminers. They still have some feast days and songs of their own. The tadde was a miner, he used to sing me that when I was little.”
Papa. A small child may call any adult matnme or tadde. Gimar’s tadde may have been her father, an uncle, or an unrelated adult who showed her parental or grandparental responsibility and affection. She may have called several people tadde or mamme, but the word has a more specific use than ammar (brother/sister), which may be used to anybody.
“Well, then, who’s ‘she’?”
“I don’t know, it’s just what the song says. Isn’t it what we’re doing here? Bringing green leaves out of stones!”
“Sounds like religion.”
“You and your fancy book-words. It’s just a song. Oh, I wish we were back at the other camp and could have a swim. I stink!”
“I stink.”
“We all stink.”
“In solidarity…”
But this camp was fifteen kilos from the beaches of the Temae, and there was only dust to swim in.
There was a man in camp whose name, spoken, sounded like Shevek’s: Shevet. When one was called the other answered. Shevek felt a kind of affinity for the man, a relation more particular than that of brotherhood, because of this random similarity. A couple of times he saw Shevet eyeing him. They did not speak to each other yet.
Shevek’s first decads in the afforestation project had been spent in silent resentment and exhaustion. People who had chosen to work in centrally functional fields such as physics should not be called upon for these projects and special levies. Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy? The work needed doing, but a lot of people didn’t care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work. In fact, a lot of them could do it better than he could. He had been proud of his strength, and had always volunteered for the “heavies” on tenth-day rotational duty; but here it was day after day, eight hours a day, in dust and heat. All day he would look forward to evening when he could be alone and think, and the instant he got to the sleeping tent after supper his head flopped down and he slept like a stone till dawn, and never a thought crossed his mind.
He found the workmates dull and loutish, and even those younger than himself treated him like a boy. Scornful and resentful, he took pleasure only in writing to his friends Tirin and Rovab in a code they had worked out at the Institute, a set of verbal equivalents to the special symbols of temporal physics. Written out, these seemed to make sense as a message, but were in fact nonsense, except for the equation or philosophical formula they masked. Shevek’s and Rovab’s equations were genuine. Tirin’s letters were very funny and would have convinced anyone that they referred to real emotions and events, but the physics in them was dubious. Shevek sent off one of these puzzles often, once he found that he could work them out in his head while he was digging holes in rock with a dull shovel in a dust storm. Tirin answered several times, Rovab only once. She was a cold girl, he knew she was cold. But none of them at the Institute knew how wretched he was. They hadn’t been posted, just as they were beginning independent research, to a damned tree-planting project. Their central function wasn’t being wasted. They were working: doing what they wanted to do. He was not working. He was being worked.