But the fact was that he liked Bedap more as a man than he ever had as a boy. Inept, insistent, dogmatic, destructive: Bedap could be all that; but he had attained a freedom of mind that Shevek craved, though he hated its expression. He had changed Shevek’s life, and Shevek knew it, knew that he was going on at last, and that it was Bedap who had enabled him to go on. He fought Bedap every step of the way, but he kept coming, to argue, to do hurt and get hurt, to find — under anger, denial, and rejection — what he sought. He did not know what he sought. But he knew where to look for it.
It was, consciously, as unhappy a time for him as the year that had preceded it. He was still getting no further with his work; in fact he had abandoned temporal physics altogether and backtracked into humble lab work, setting up various experiments in the radiation laboratory with a deft, silent technician as partner, studying subatomic velocities. It was a well-trodden field, and his belated entry into it was taken by his colleagues as an admission that he had finally stopped trying to be original. The Syndicate of Members of the Institute gave him a course to teach, mathematical physics for entering students. He got no sense of triumph from finally having been given a course, for it was just that: he had been given it, been permitted it. He got little comfort from anything. That the walls of his hard puritanical conscience were widening out immensely was anything but a comfort. He felt cold and lost. But he had nowhere to retreat to, no shelter, so he kept coming farther out into the cold, getting farther lost.
Bedap had made many friends, an erratic and disaffected lot, and some of them took a liking to the shy man. He felt no closer to them than to the more conventional people he knew at the Institute, but he found their independence of mind more interesting. They preserved autonomy of conscience even at the cost of becoming eccentric. Some of them were intellectual nuchnibi who had not worked on a regular posting for years. Shevek disapproved of them severely, when he was not with them.
One of them was a composer named Salas. Salas and Shevek wanted to learn from each other. Salas had little math, but as long as Shevek could explain physics in the analogic or experiential modes, he was an eager and intelligent listener. In the same way Shevek would listen to anything Salas could tell him about musical theory, and anything Salas would play him on tape or on his instrument, the portative. But some of what Salas told him he found extremely troubling. Salas had taken a posting to a canal-digging crew on the Plains of the Temae, east of Abbenay. He came into the city on his three days off each decad, and stayed with one girl or another. Shevek assumed that he had taken the posting because he wanted a bit of outdoor work for a change; but then he found that Salas had never had a posting in music, or in anything but unskilled labor.
“What’s your listing at Divlab?” he asked, puzzled.
“General labor pool.”
“But you’re skilled! You put in six or eight years at the Music Syndicate conservatory, didn’t you? Why don’t they post you to music teaching?”
“They did. I refused. I won’t be ready to teach for another ten years. I’m a composer, remember, not a performer.”
“But there must be postings for composers.”
“Where?”
“In the Music Syndicate, I suppose.”
“But the Music syndics don’t like my compositions. And nobody much else does, yet I can’t be a syndicate all by myself, can I?”
Salas was a bony little man, already bald on the upper face and cranium; he wore what was left of his hair short, in a silky beige fringe around the back of his neck and chin. His smile was sweet, wrinkling his expressive face. “You see, I don’t write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.” He smiled more sweetly than ever. “They want chorales. I hate chorales. They want wide-harmony pieces like Sessur wrote. I hate Sessur’s music. I’m writing a piece of chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. Five instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes a lovely harmony. But they don’t hear it. They won’t hear it. They can’t!”
Shevek brooded a while. “If you called it The Joys of Solidarity,” he said, “would they hear it?”
“By damn!” said Bedap, who was listening in. “That’s the first cynical thing you ever said in your life, Shev. Welcome to the work crew!”
Salas laughed. “They’d give it a hearing, but they’d turn it down for taping or regional performance. It’s not in the Organic Style.”
“No wonder I never heard any professional music while I lived in Northsetting. But how can they justify this kind of censorship? You write music! Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we’re capable of. It’s certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it’s a sharing. The artist shares, it’s the essence of his act. No matter what your syndics say, how can Divlab justify not giving you a posting in your own field?”
“They don’t want to share it,” Salas said gleefully. “It scares ’em.”
Bedap spoke more gravely: “They can justify it because music isn’t useful. Canal digging is important, you know; music’s mere decoration. The circle has come right back around to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal, we’ve thrown it all away. We’ve gone right back to barbarism. If it’s new, run away from it; if you can’t eat it, throw it away!”
Shevek thought of his own work and had nothing to say. Yet he could not join in Bedap’s criticism. Bedap had forced him to realize that he was, in fact, a revolutionary; but he felt profoundly that he was such by virtue of his upbringing and education as an Odonian and an Anarresti. He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one’s soul.
Bedap and some of his friends were taking off a decad together, going on a hiking tour in the Ne Theras. He had persuaded Shevek to come. Shevek liked the prospect of ten days in the mountains, but not the prospect of ten days of Bedap’s opinions. Bedap’s conversation was all too much like a Criticism Session, the communal activity he had always liked least, when everybody stood up and complained about defects in the functioning of the community and, usually, defects in the characters of the neighbors. The nearer the vacation came the less he looked forward to it. But he stuck a notebook in his pocket, so he could get away and pretend to be working, and went.
They met behind the Eastern Points trucking depot early in the morning, three women and three men. Shevek did not know any of the women, and Bedap introduced him to only two of them. As they set off on the road toward the mountains he fell in beside the third one. “Shevek,” he said.
She said, “I know.”
He realized that he must have met her somewhere before and should know her name. His ears got red.
“Are you being funny?” Bedap asked, moving in on the left, “Takver was at Northsetting Institute with us. She’s been living in Abbenay for two years. Haven’t you two seen each other here till now?”
“I’ve seen him a couple of times,” the girl said, and laughed at him. She had the laugh of a person who likes to eat well, a big, childish gape. She was tall and rather thin, with round arms and broad hips. She was not very pretty; her face was swarthy, intelligent, and cheerful. In her eyes there was a darkness, not the opacity of bright dark eyes but a quality of depth, almost like deep, black, fine ash, very soft. Shevek, meeting her eyes, knew that he had committed an unforgivable fault in forgetting her and, in the instant of knowing it, knew also that he had been forgiven. That he was in luck. That his luck had changed.