“You’ve learned Iotic? Why do you write in it?”

“Because nobody on this planet can understand what I’m saying. Or wants to. The only one who did died three days ago.”

“Sabul’s dead?”

“No. Gvarab. Sabul isn’t dead. Fat chance!”

“What’s the trouble?”

“The trouble with Sabul? Half envy, the other half incompetence.”

“I thought his book on causality was supposed to be first-rate. You said so.”

“I thought so, till I read the sources. They’re all Urrasti ideas. Not new ones, either. He hasn’t had a thought of his own for twenty years. Or a bath.”

“How are your thoughts?” asked Bedap, putting a hand on the notebooks and looking at Shevek under his brows. Bedap had small, rather squinting eyes, a strong face, a thickset body. He bit his fingernails, and in years of doing so had reduced them to mere strips across his thick, sensitive fingertips.

“No good,” said Shevek, sitting down on the bed platform. “I’m in the wrong field.”

Bedap grinned. “You?”

“I think at the end of this quarter I’ll ask for reposting.”

“To what?”

“I don’t care. Teaching, engineering. I’ve got to get out of physics.”

Bedap sat down in the desk chair, bit a fingernail, and said, “That sounds odd.”

“I’ve recognized my limitations.”

“I didn’t know you had any. In physics, I mean. You had all sorts of limitations and defects. But not in physics. I’m no temporalist, I know. But you don’t have to be able to swim to know a fish, you don’t have to shine to recognize a star—”

Shevek looked at his friend and said, blurted out, what he had never been able to say clearly to himself: “I’ve thought of suicide. A good deal. This year. It seems the best way.”

“It’s hardly the way to come out on the other side of suffering.”

Shevek smiled stiffly. “You remember that?”

“Vividly. It was a very important conversation to me. And to Takver and Tirin, I think.”

“Was it?” Shevek stood up. There was only four steps pacing room, but he could not hold still. “It was important to me then,” he said, standing at the window. “But I’ve changed, here. There’s something wrong here. I don’t know what it is.”

“I do,” Bedap said. “The wall. You’ve come up against the wall.”

Shevek turned with a frightened look. “The wall?”

“In your case, the wall seems to be Sabul, and his supporters in the science syndicates and the PDC. As for me, I’ve been in Abbenay four decads. Forty days. Long enough to see that in forty years here I’ll accomplish nothing, nothing at all, of what I want to do, the improvement of science instruction in the learning centers. Unless things are changed. Or unless I join the enemies.”

“Enemies?”

“The little men. Sabul’s friends! The people in power.”

“What are you talking about, Dap? We have no power structure.”

“No? What makes Sabul so strong?”

“Not a power structure, a government. This isn’t Urras, after all!”

“No. We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas never were controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras. If they had been, how would Odo have worked out hers? How would Odonianism have become a world movement? The archists tried to stamp it out by force, and failed. You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that’s precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can’t, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn’t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn’t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That’s the power structure he’s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.”

Shevek leaned his hands on the window sill, looking through the dim reflections on the pane into the darkness outside. He said at last, “Crazy talk, Dap.”

“No, brother, I’m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain — you said that! But it’s the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It’s the lies that make you want to kill yourself.”

Shevek turned around to face him. “But you can’t seriously talk of a government, here!”

“Tomar’s Definitions: ‘Government: The legal use of power to maintain and extend power.’ Replace ‘legal’ with ‘customary,’ and you’ve got Sabul, and the Syndicate of Instruction, and the PDC.”

“The PDC!”

“The PDC is, by now, basically an archistic bureaucracy.”

After a moment Shevek laughed, not quite naturally, and said, “Well, come on, Dap, this is amusing, but it’s a bit diseased, isn’t it?”

“Shev, did you ever think that what the analogic mode calls ‘disease,’ social disaffection, discontent, alienation, that this might analogically also be called pain — what you meant when you talked about pain, suffering? And that, like pain, it serves a function in the organism?”

“No!” Shevek said, violently. “I was talking in personal, in spiritual terms.”

“But you spoke of physical suffering, of a man dying of burns. And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life — is anything more basic to Odonian thought than that? But nothing changes any more! Our society is sick. You know it. You’re suffering its sickness. Its suicidal sickness!”

“That’s enough, Dap. Drop it.”

Bedap said no more. He began to bite his thumbnail, methodically and thoughtfully.

Shevek sat down again on the bed platform and put his head in his hands. There was a long silence. The snow had ceased. A dry, dark wind pushed at the windowpane. The room was cold; neither of the young men had taken off his coat.

“Look, brother,” Shevek said at last. “It’s not our society that frustrates individual creativity. It’s the poverty of Anarres. This planet wasn’t meant to support civilization. If we let one another down, if we don’t give up our personal desires to the common good, nothing, nothing on this barren world can save us. Human solidarity is our only resource.”

“Solidarity, yes! Even on Urras, where food falls out of the trees, even there Odo said that human solidarity is our one hope. But we’ve betrayed that hope. We’ve let cooperation become obedience. On Urras they have government by the minority. Here we have government by the majority. But it is government! The social conscience isn’t a living thing any more, but a machine, a power machine, controlled by bureaucrats!”

“You or I could volunteer and be lottery-posted to PDC within a few decads. Would that turn us into bureaucrats, bosses?”

“It’s not the individuals posted to PDC, Shev. Most of them are like us. All too much like us. Well-meaning, naive. And it’s not just PDC. It’s anywhere on Anarres. Learning centers, institutes, mines, mills, fisheries, canneries, agricultural development and research stations, factories, one-product communities — anywhere that function demands expertise and a stable institution. But that stability gives scope to the authoritarian impulse. In the early years of the Settlement we were aware of that, on the lookout for it. People discriminated very carefully then between administering things and governing people. They did it so well that we forgot that the will to dominance is as central in human beings as the impulse to mutual aid is, and has to be trained in each individual, in each new generation. Nobody’s born an Odonian any more than he’s born civilized! But we’ve forgotten that. We don’t educate for freedom. Education, the most important activity of the social organism, has become rigid, moralistic, authoritarian. Kids learn to parrot Odo’s words as if they were laws — the ultimate blasphemy!”