Chapter 6

When Shevek was sent home after a decad in hospital, his neighbor in Room 45 came in to see him. He was a mathematician, very tall and thin. He had an uncorrected walleye, so that you never could be sure whether he was looking at you and/or you were looking at him. He and Shevek had coexisted amicably, side by side in the Institute domicile, for a year, without ever saying a full sentence to each other.

Desar now came in and stared at or beside Shevek. “Anything?” he said.

“I’m doing fine, thanks.”

“What about bring dinner commons.”

“With yours?” Shevek said, influenced by Desar’s telegraphic style.

“All right.”

Desar brought two dinners on a tray over from the Institute refectory, and they ate together in Shevek’s room. He did the same morning and night for three days till Shevek felt up to going out again. It was hard to see why Desar did this. He was not friendly, and the expectations of brotherhood seemed to mean little to him. One reason he held aloof from people was to hide his dishonesty; he was either appallingly lazy or frankly propertarian, for Room 45 was full of stuff that he had no right or reason to keep — dishes from commons, books from libraries, a set of woodcarving tools from a craft-supply depot, a microscope from some laboratory, eight different blankets, a closet stuffed with clothes, some of which plainly did not fit Desar and never had, others of which appeared to be things he had worn when he was eight or ten. It looked as if he went to depositories and warehouses and picked things up by the armload whether he needed them or not. “What do you keep all this junk for?” Shevek asked when he was first admitted to the room. Desar stared between him. “Just builds up,” he said vaguely.

Desar’s chosen field in mathematics was so esoteric that nobody in the Institute or the Math Federation could really check on his progress. That was precisely why he had chosen it. He assumed that Shevek’s motivation was the same. “Hell,” he said, “work? Good post here. Sequency. Simultaneity, shit.” At some moments Shevek liked Desar, and at others detested him, for the same qualities. He stuck to him, however, deliberately, as part of his resolution to change his life.

His illness had made him realize that if he tried to go on alone he would break down altogether. He saw this in moral terms, and judged himself ruthlessly. He had been keeping himself for himself, against the ethical imperative of brotherhood. Shevek at twenty-one was not a prig, exactly, because his morality was passionate and drastic; but it was still fitted to a rigid mold, the simplistic Odonianism taught to children by mediocre adults, an internalized preaching.

He had been doing wrong. He must do right. He did so.

He forbade himself physics five nights in ten. He volunteered for committee work in the Institute domicile management. He attended meetings of the Physics Federation and the Syndicate of Members of the Institute. He enrolled with a group who were practicing biofeedback exercises and brain-wave training. At the refectory he forced himself to sit down at the large tables, instead of at a small one with a book in front of him.

It was surprising: people seemed to have been waiting for him. They included him, welcomed him, invited him as bedfellow and companion. They took him about with them, and within three decads he learned more about Abbenay than he had in a year. He went with groups of cheerful young people to athletic fields, craft centers, swimming pools, festivals, museums, theaters, concerts.

The concerts: they were a revelation, a shock of joy.

He had never gone to a concert here in Abbenay, partly because he thought of music as something you do rather than something you hear. As a child he had always sung, or played one instrument or another, in local choirs and ensembles; he had enjoyed it very much, but had not had much talent And that was all he knew of music.

Learning centers taught all the skills that prepare for the practice of art: training in singing, metrics, dance, the use of brush, chisel, knife, lathe, and so on. It was all pragmatic: the children learned to see, speak, hear, move, handle. No distinction was drawn between the arts and the crafts; art was not considered as having a place in life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech. Thus architecture had developed, early and freely, a consistent style, pure and plain, subtle in proportion. Painting and sculpture served largely as elements of architecture and town planning. As for the arts of words, poetry and storytelling tended to be ephemeral, to be linked with song and dancing; only the theater stood wholly alone, and only the theater was ever called “the Art” — a thing complete in itself. There were many regional and traveling troupes of actors and dancers, repertory companies, very often with playwright attached. They performed tragedies, semi-improvised comedies, mimes. They were as welcome as rain in the lonely desert towns, they were the glory of the year wherever they came. Rising out of and embodying the isolation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama had attained extraordinary power and brilliance.

Shevek, however, was not very sensitive to the drama. He liked the verbal splendor, but the whole idea of acting was uncongenial to him. It was not until this second year in Abbenay that he discovered, at last, his Art: the art that is made out of time. Somebody took him along to a concert at the Syndicate of Music. He went back the next night. He went to every concert, with his new acquaintances if possible, without if need be. The music was a more urgent need, a deeper satisfaction, than the companionship.

His efforts to break out of his essential seclusion were, in fact, a failure, and he knew it. He made, no close friend. He copulated with a number of girls, but copulation was not the joy it ought to be. It was a mere relief of need, like evacuating, and he felt ashamed of it afterward because it involved another person as object. Masturbation was preferable, the suitable course for a man like himself. Solitude was his fate; he was trapped in his heredity. She had said it: “The work comes first.” Rulag had said it calmly, stating fact, powerless to change it, to break out of her cold cell. So it was with him. His heart yearned towards them, the kindly young souls who called him brother, but he could not reach them, nor they him. He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.

The work came first, but it went nowhere. Like sex, it ought to have been a pleasure, and it wasn’t. He kept grinding over the same problems, getting not a step nearer the solution of To’s Temporal Paradox, let alone the Theory of Simultaneity, which last year he had thought was almost in his grasp. That self-assurance now seemed incredible to him. Had he really thought himself capable, at age twenty, of evolving a theory that would change the foundations of cosmological physics? He had been out of his mind for a good while before the fever, evidently. He enrolled in two work groups in philosophical mathematics, convincing himself that he needed them and refusing to admit that he could have directed either course as well as the instructors. He avoided Sabul as much as he could.

In his first burst of new resolutions he had made a point of getting to know Gvarab better. She responded as well as she could, but the winter had been hard on her; she was ill, and deaf, and old. She started a spring course and then gave it up. She was erratic, hardly recognizing Shevek one time, and the next dragging him off to her domicile for a whole evening’s talk. He had got somewhat beyond Gvarab’s ideas, and he found these long talks hard. Either he had to let Gvarab bore him for hours, repeating what he already knew or had partly disproved, or he had to hurt and confuse her by trying to set her straight. It was beyond the patience or tact of anyone his age, and he ended up evading Gvarab when he could, always with a bad conscience.