He saw in the distance among the vivid fields a long smudge of white, which broke into cubes, like spilt salt, as the dirigible came over.
A cluster of dazzling flashes at the east edge of the city made him wink and see dark spots for a moment: the big parabolic mirrors that provided solar heat for Abbenay’s refineries.
The dirigible came down at a cargo depot at the south end of town, and Shevek set off into the streets of the biggest city in the world.
They were wide, clean streets. They were shadowless, for Abbenay lay less than thirty degrees north of the equator, and all the buildings were low, except the strong, spare towers of the wind turbines. The sun shone white in a hard, dark, blue-violet sky. The air was clear and clean, without smoke or moisture. There was a vividness to things, a hardness of edge and corner, a clarity. Everything stood out separate, itself.
The elements that made up Abbenay were the same as in any other Odonian community, repeated many times: workshops, factories, domiciles, dormitories, learning centers, meeting halls, distributories, depots, refectories. The bigger buildings were most often grouped around open squares, giving the city a basic cellular texture; it was one subcommunity or neighborhood after another. Heavy industry and food-processing plants tended to cluster on the city’s outskirts, and the cellular pattern was repeated in that related industries often stood side by side on a certain square or street The first such that Shevek walked through was a series of squares, the textile district, full of holum-fiber processing plants, spinning and weaving mills, dye factories, and cloth and clothing distributories; the center of each square was planted with a little forest of poles strung from top to bottom with banners and pennants of all the colors of the dyer’s art, proudly proclaiming the local industry. Most of the city’s buildings were pretty much alike, plain, soundly built of stone or cast foamstone. Some of them looked very large to Shevek’s eyes, but they were almost all of one storey only, because of the frequency of earthquake. For the same reason windows were small, and of a tough silicon plastic that did not shatter. They were small, but there were a lot of them, for there was no artificial lighting provided from an hour before sunrise to an hour after sunset. No heat was furnished when the outside temperature went above 55 degrees Fahrenheit. It was not that Abbenay was short of power, not with her wind turbines and the earth temperature-differential generators used for heating; but the principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly. “Excess is excrement,” Odo wrote in the Analogy. “Excrement retained in the body is a poison.”
Abbenay was poisonless: a bare city, bright, the colors light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet. You could see it all, laid out as plain as spilt salt.
Nothing was hidden.
The squares, the austere streets, the low buildings, the unwalled workyards, were charged with vitality and activity. As Shevek walked he was constantly aware of other people walking, working, talking, faces passing, voices calling, gossiping, singing, people alive, people doing things, people afoot. Workshops and factories fronted on squares or on their open yards, and their doors were open. He passed a glassworks, the workman dipping up a great molten blob as casually as a cook serves soup. Next to it was a busy yard where foamstone was cast for construction. The gang foreman, a big woman in a smock white with dust, was supervising the pouring of a cast with a loud and splendid flow of language. After that came a small wire factory, a district laundry, a luthier’s where musical instruments were made and repaired, the district small-goods distributory, a theater, a tile works. The activity going on in each place was fascinating, and mostly out in full view. Children were around, some involved in the work with the adults, some underfoot making mud-pies, some busy with games in the street, one sitting perched up on the roof of the learning center with her nose deep in a book. The wiremaker had decorated the shopfront with patterns of vines worked in painted wire, cheerful and ornate. The blast of steam and conversation from the wide-open doors of the laundry was overwhelming. No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the city, open to the eye and to the hand. And every now and then down Depot Street a thing came careering by clanging a bell, a vehicle crammed full of people and with people festooned on stanchions all over the outside, old women cursing heartily as it failed to slow down at their stop so they could scramble off, a little boy on a homemade tricycle pursuing it madly, electric sparks showering blue from the overhead wires at crossings: as if that quiet intense vitality of the streets built up every now and then to discharge point, and leapt the gap with a crash and a blue crackle and the smell of ozone. These were the Abbenay omnibuses, and as they passed one felt like cheering.
Depot Street ended in a large airy place where five other streets rayed in to a triangular park of grass and trees. Most parks on Anarres were playgrounds of dirt or sand, with a stand of shrub and tree holums. This one was different. Shevek crossed the trafficless pavement and entered the park, drawn to it because he had seen it often in pictures, and because he wanted to see alien trees, Urrasti trees, from close up, to experience the greenness of those multitudinous leaves. The sun was setting, the sky was wide and clear, darkening to purple at the zenith, the dark of space showing through the thin atmosphere. He entered under the trees, alert, wary. Were they not wasteful, those crowding leaves? The tree holum got along very efficiently with spines and needles, and no excess of those. Wasn’t all this extravagant foliage mere excess, excrement? Such trees couldn’t thrive without a rich soil, constant watering, much care. He disapproved of their lavishness, their thriftlessness. He walked under them, among them. The alien grass was soft underfoot. It was like walking on living flesh. He shied back onto the path. The dark limbs of the trees reached out over his head, holding their many wide green hands above him. Awe came into him. He knew himself blessed though he had not asked for blessing.
Some way before him, down the darkening path, a person sat reading on a stone bench.
Shevek went forward slowly. He came to the bench and stood looking at the figure who sat with head bowed over the book in the green-gold dusk under the trees. It was a woman of fifty or sixty, strangely dressed, her hair pulled back in a knot. Her left hand on her chin nearly hid the stern mouth, her right held the papers on her knee. They were heavy, those papers; the cold hand on them was heavy. The light was dying fast but she never looked up. She went on reading the proof sheets of The Social Organism.
Shevek looked at Odo for a while, and then he sat down on the bench beside her.
He had no concept of status at all, and there was plenty of room on the bench. He was moved by a pure impulse of companionship.
He looked at the strong, sad profile, and at the hands, an old woman’s hands. He looked up into the shadowy branches. For the first time in his life he comprehended that Odo, whose face he had known since his infancy, whose ideas were central and abiding in his mind and the mind of everyone he knew, that Odo had never set foot on Anarres: that she had lived, and died, and was buried, in the shadow of green-leaved trees, in unimaginable cities, among people speaking unknown languages, on another world. Odo was an alien: an exile.
The young man sat beside the statue in the twilight, one almost as quiet as the other.