There was nobody else to talk shop with. Nobody at the Institute knew enough about pure temporal physics to keep up with him. He would have liked to teach it, but he had not yet been given a teaching posting or a classroom at the Institute; the faculty-student Syndicate of Members turned down his request for one. They did not want a quarrel with Sabul.
As the year went on he took to spending a good deal of his time writing letters to Atro and other physicists and mathematicians on Urras. Few of these letters were sent. Some he wrote and then simply tore up. He discovered that the mathematician Loai An, to whom he had written a six-page discourse on temporal reversibility, had been dead for twenty years; he had neglected to read the biographical preface to An’s Geometries of Time. Other letters, which he undertook to get carried by the freight ships from Urras, were stopped by the managers of the Port of Abbenay. The Port was under direct control of PDC, since its operation involved the coordination of many syndicates, and some of the coordinators had to know Iotic. These Port managers, with their special knowledge and important position, tended to acquire the bureaucratic mentality: they said “no” automatically. They mistrusted the letters to mathematicians, which looked like code, and which nobody could assure them weren’t code. Letters to physicists were passed if Sabul, their consultant, approved them. He would not approve those that dealt with subjects outside his own brand of Sequency physics. “Not within my competence,” he would growl, pushing the letter aside. Shevek would send it on to the Port managers anyhow, and it would come back marked “Not approved for export.”
He brought this matter up at the Physics Federation, which Sabul seldom bothered to attend. Nobody there attached importance to the issue of free communication with the ideological enemy. Some of them lectured Shevek for working in a field so arcane that there was, by his own admission, nobody else on his own world competent in it. “But it’s only new,” he said, which got him nowhere.”
“If it’s new, share it with us, not with the propertarians!”
“I’ve tried to offer a course every quarter for a year now. You always say there isn’t enough demand for it. Are you afraid of it because it’s new?”
That won him no friends. He left them in anger.
He went on writing letters to Urras, even when he mailed none of them at all. The fact of writing for someone who might understand — who might have understood — made it possible for him to write, to think. Otherwise it was not possible.
The decads went by, and the quarters. Two or three times a year the reward came: a letter from Atro or another physicist in A-Io or Thu, a long letter, close-written, close-argued, all theory from salutation to signature, all intense abstruse meta-mathematical-ethico-cosmological temporal physics, written in a language he could not speak by men he did not know, fiercely trying to combat and destroy his theories, enemies of his homeland, rivals, strangers, brothers.
For days after getting a letter he was irascible and joyful, worked day and night, foamed out ideas like a fountain. Then slowly, with desperate spurts and struggles, he came back to earth, to dry ground, ran dry.
He was finishing his third year at the Institute when Gvarab died. He asked to speak at her memorial service, which was held, as the custom was, in the place where the dead person had worked: in this case one of the lecture rooms in the Physics laboratory building. He was the only speaker. No students attended; Gvarab had not taught for two years. A few elderly members of the Institute came, and Gvarab’s middle-aged son, an agricultural chemist from Northeast, was there. Shevek stood where the old woman had used to stand to lecture. He told these people, in a voice hoarsened by his now customary winter chest cold, that Gvarab had laid the foundations of the science of time, and was the greatest cosmologist who had ever worked at the Institute. “We in physics have our Odo now,” he said. “We have her, and we did not honor her.” Afterwards an old woman thanked him, with tears in her eyes. “We always took tenthdays together, her and me, janitoring in our block, we used to have such good times talking,” she said, wincing in the icy wind as they came out of the building. The agricultural chemist muttered civilites and hurried off to catch a ride back to Northeast. In a rage of grief, impatience, and futility, Shevek struck off walking at random through the city.
Three years here, and he had accomplished what? A book, appropriated by Sabul; five or six unpublished papers; and a funeral oration for a wasted life.
Nothing he did was understood. To put it more honestly, nothing he did was meaningful. He was fulfilling no necessary function, personal or social. In fact — it was not an uncommon phenomenon in his field — he had burnt out at twenty. He would achieve nothing further. He had come up against the wall for good.
He stopped in front of the Music Syndicate auditorium to read the programs for the decad. There was no concert tonight. He turned away from the poster and came face to face with Bedap.
Bedap, always defensive and rather nearsighted, gave no sign of recognition. Shevek caught his arm.
“Shevek! By damn, it’s you!” They hugged each other, kissed, broke apart, hugged again. Shevek was overwhelmed by love. Why? He had not even much liked Bedap that last year at the Regional Institute. They had never written, these three years. Their friendship was a boyhood one, past. Yet love was there: flamed up as from shaken coal.
They walked, talked, neither noticing where they went. They waved their arms and interrupted each other. The wide streets of Abbenay were quiet in the winter night. At each crossing the dim streetlight made a pool of silver, across which dry snow flurried like shoals of tiny fish, chasing their shadows. The wind came bitter cold behind the snow. Numbed lips and chattering teeth began to interfere with conversation. They caught the ten o’clock omnibus, the last, to the Institute; Bedap’s domicile was out on the east edge of the city, a long pull in the cold.
He looked at Room 46 with ironic wonder. “Shev, you live like a rotten Urrasti profiteer.”
“Come on, it’s not that bad. Show me anything excremental!” The room in fact contained just about what it had when Shevek first entered it. Bedap pointed: “That blanket”
“That was here when I came. Somebody handmade it, and left it when they moved. Is a blanket excessive on a night like this?”
“It’s definitely an excremental color,” Bedap said. “As a functions analyst I must point out that there is no need for orange. Orange serves no vital function in the social organism at either the cellular or the organic level, and certainly not at the holorganismic or most centrally ethical level; in which case tolerance is a less good choice then excretion. Dye it dirty green, brother! What’s all this stuff?”
“Notes.”
“In code?” Bedap asked, looking through a notebook with the coolness Shevek remembered was characteristic of him. He had even less sense of privacy — or private ownership — than most Anarresti. Bedap had never had a favorite pencil that he carried around with him, or an old shirt he had got fond of and hated to dump in the recycle bin, and if given a present he tried to keep it out of regard for the giver’s feelings, but always lost it. He was conscious of this trait and said it showed he was less primitive than most people, an early example of the Promised Man, the true and native Odonian. But he did have a sense of privacy. It began at the skull, his own or another’s, and from there on in it was complete. He never pried He said now, “Remember those fool letters we used to write in code when you were on the afforestation project?”
“That isn’t code, it’s Iotic.”