“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 couldn’t come, remember? To get the money that goes with it!” Shevek smiled, luminous. If there was a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he had always been alone.
That’s right. I did know that. It just didnt register as an actual possibility. You’d been talking for decads about suggesting in PDC that somebody might go to Unas, 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, exercising her teeth on a piece of holum bread and her voice in song. “O mathery bathery,” she proclaimed, “ab-bery abbery babber dabP Shevek, versatile, replied in the same vein. Adult conversation proceeded without intensity and with interruptions. Bedap did not mind, he had learned long 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 when be 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 fted Pilun, 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 what’s wrong?”
Sadik’s delicate, long face quivered and seemed to fragment. “They don’t like me, in the dormitory,” she said, her voice becoming 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 don’t 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 sobs. 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 eyes were full of tears. He said, “It’s all right, Dap. Go on.”
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 lie 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 decads. 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.
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 corner 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 sitting on the front step of the dormitory, and went in to tell the vigflkeeper 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.
When the baby was replete and put down to sleep,
Takver said in a low but impassioned voice, “Now! What is it?”
Sadik had gone half to sleep herself, her head on Shevek’s chest. He could feel her gather herself to answer. He stroked her hair to keep her quiet, and answered for her. “Some people at the learning center disapprove of us.”
“And by damn what damned right have they to disapprove of us?”
“Shh, shh. Of the Syndicate.”
“Oh,” Takver said, a queer guttural noise, and in buttoning up her tunic she tore the button right off the fabric. She stood looking down at it on her palm. Then she looked at Shevek and Sadik.
“How long has this been going on?”
“A long time.” Sadik said, not lifting her head.
“Days, decads, all quarter?”
“Oh, longer. But they get… they’re meaner in the dorm now. At night. Terzol doesn’t stop them.” Sadik spoke rather like a sleep-talker, and quite serenely, as if the matter no longer concerned her.
“What do they do?” Takver asked, though Shevek’s gaze warned her.
“Well, they… they’re just mean. They keep me out of the games and things. Tip, you know, she was a friend, she used to come and talk at least after lights out. But she stopped. Terzol is the big sister in the dorm now, and she’s… she says, ‘Shevek is— Shevek—’ ”
He broke in, feeling the tension rise in the child’s body, the cowering and the summoning of courage, unendurable. “She says, ‘Shevek is a traitor, Sadik is an egoizer’ — You know what she says, Takver His eyes were blazing. Takver came forward and touched her daughter’s cheek, once, rather timidly. She said in a quiet voice, “Yes, I know,” and went and sat down on the other bed platform, facing them.