Chapter 7

Shevek found a letter in a pocket of the new, fleece-lined coat he had ordered for winter from the shop in the nightmare street. He had no idea how the letter had got there. It certainly had not been in the mail delivered to him thrice daily, which consisted entirely of manuscripts and reprints from physicists all over Urras, invitations to receptions, and artless messages from schoolchildren. This was a flimsy piece of paper stuck down to itself without envelope; it bore no stamp or frank from any of the three competing mail companies.

He opened it, vaguely apprehensive, and read: “If you are an Anarchist why do you work with the power system betraying your World and the Odonian Hope or are you here to bring us that Hope. Suffering from injustice and repression we look to the Sister World the light of freedom in the dark night. Join with us your brothers!” There was no signature, no address.

It shook Shevek both morally and intellectually, jolted him, not with surprise but with a kind of panic. He knew they were here: but where? He had not met one, not seen one, he had not met a poor man yet. He had let a wall be built around him and had never noticed. He had accepted shelter, like a propertarian. He had been co-opted — just as Chifoilisk had said.

But he did not know how to break down the wall. And if he did, where could he go? The panic closed in on him tighter. To whom could he turn? He was surrounded on all sides by the smiles of the rich.

“I’d like to talk with you, Efor.”

“Yes sir. Excuse me, sir, I make room set this down here.”

The servant handled the heavy tray deftly, flicked off dish covers, poured out the bitter chocolate so it rose frothing to the cup’s rim without spill or splatter. He clearly enjoyed the breakfast ritual and his adeptness at it, and as clearly wanted no unusual interruptions in it. He often spoke quite clear Iotic, but now as soon as Shevek said he wanted a talk Efor had slid into the staccato of the city dialect. Shevek had learned to follow it a little; the shift of sound values was consistent once you caught it, but the apocopations left him groping. Half the words were left out. It was like a code, he thought: as if the “Nioti,” as they called themselves, did not want to be understood by outsiders.

The manservant stood awaiting Shevek’s pleasure. He knew — he had learned Shevek’s idiosyncrasies within the first week — that Shevek did not want him to hold a chair, or to wait on him while he ate. His erect attentive pose was enough to wither any hope of informality.

“Will you sit down, Efor?”

“If you please sir,” the man replied. He moved a chair half an inch, but did not sit down in it.

“This is what I want to talk about. You know I don’t like to give you orders.”

“Try manage things like you want sir without troubling for orders.”

“You do — I don’t mean that. You know, in my country nobody gives any orders.”

“So I hear sir.”

“Well, I want to know you as my equal, my brother. You are the only one I know here who is not rich — not one of the owners. I want very much to talk with you, I want to know about your life—”

He stopped in despair, seeing the contempt on Efor’s lined face. He had made all the mistakes possible. Efor took him for a patronizing, prying fool.

He dropped his hands to the table in a gesture of hopelessness and said, “Oh, hell, I am sorry, Efor!” I cannot say what I mean. Please ignore it”

“Just as you say sir.” Efor withdrew.

That was the end of that. The “unpropertied classes” remained as remote from him as when he had read about them in history at Northsetting Regional Institute.

Meanwhile, he had promised to spend a week with the Oiies, between winter and spring terms.

Oiie had invited him to dinner several times since his first visit, always rather stiffly, as if he were carrying out a duty of hospitality, or perhaps a governmental order. In his own house, however, though never wholly off his guard with Shevek, he was genuinely friendly. By the second visit his two sons had decided that Shevek was an old friend, and their confidence in Shevek’s response obviously puzzled their father. It made him uneasy; he could not really approve of it; but he could not say it was unjustified. Shevek behaved to them like an old friend, like an elder brother. They admired him, and the younger, Ini, came to love him passionately, Shevek was kind, serious honest, and told very good stories about the Moon; but there was more to it than that. He represented something to the child that Ini could not describe. Even much later in his life, which was profoundly and obscurely influenced by that childhood fascination, Ini found no words for it, only words that held an echo of it: the word voyager, the word exile.

The only heavy snow of the winter fell that week. Shevek had never seen a snowfall of more than an inch or so. The extravagance, the sheer quantity, of the storm exhilarated him. He reveled in its excess. It was too white, too cold, silent, and indifferent to be called excremental by the sincerest Odonian; to see it as other than an innocent magnificence would be pettiness of soul. As soon as the sky cleared he went out in it with the boys, who appreciated it just as he did. They ran around in the big back garden of the Oiie house, threw snowballs, built tunnels, castles, and fortresses of snow.

Sewa Oiie stood with her sister-in-law Vea at the window, watching the children, the man, and the little otter playing. The otter had made himself a snowslide down one wall of the snow castle and was excitedly tobogganing down it on his belly over and over again. The boys’ cheeks were fiery. The man, his long, rough, dun-grey hair tied back with a piece of string and his ears red with cold, executed tunneling operations with energy. “Not here! — Dig there! — Where’s the shovel? — Ice in my pocket!” — the boys’ high voices rang out continually.

“There is our alien,” Sewa said, smiling.

“The greatest physicist alive,” said the sister-in-law. “How funny!”

When he came in, puffing and stamping off snow and exhaling that fresh, cold vigor and well-being which only people just in out of the snow possess, he was introduced to the sister-in-law. He put out his big, hard, cold hand and looked down at Vea with friendly eyes. “You are Demaere’s sister?” he said. “Yes, you look like him.” And this remark, which from anyone else would have struck Vea as insipid, pleased her immensely. “He is a man,” she kept thinking that afternoon, “a real man. What is it about him?”

Vea Doem Oiie was her name, in the Ioti mode; her husband Doem was the head of a large industrial combine and traveled a good deal, spending half of each year abroad as a business representative of the government. This was explained to Shevek, while he watched her. In her, Demaere Oiie’s slightness, pale coloring, and oval black eyes had been transmuted into beauty. Her breasts, shoulders, and arms were round, soft, and very white. Shevek sat beside her at the dinner table. He kept looking at her bare breasts, pushed upward by the stiff bodice. The notion of going thus half naked in freezing weather was extravagant, as extravagant as the snow, and the small breasts had also an innocent whiteness, like the snow. The curve of her neck went up smoothly into the curve of the proud, shaven, delicate head.

She really is quite attractive, Shevek informed himself. She’s like the beds here: soft. Affected, though. Why does she mince out her words like that?

He clung to her rather thin voice and mincing manner as to a raft on deep water, and never knew it, never knew he was drowning. She was going back to Nio Esseia on the train after dinner, she had merely come out for the day and he would never see her again.