Oiie had a cold, Sewa was busy with the children. “Shevek, do you think you might walk Vea to the station?”

“Good Lord, Demaere! Don’t make the poor man protect me! You don’t think there’ll be wolves, do you? Will savage Mingrads come sweeping into town and abduct me to their harems? Will I be found on the stationmaster’s doorstep tomorrow morning, a tear frozen in my eye and my tiny, rigid hands clasping a bunch of withered posies? Oh, I do rather like that!” Over Vea’s rattling, tinkling talk her laugh broke like a wave, a dark, smooth, powerful wave that washed out everything and left the sand empty. She did not laugh with herself but at herself, the body’s dark laughter, wiping out words.

Shevek put on his coat in the hall and was waiting for her at the door.

They walked in silence for a half a block. Snow crunched and squeaked under their feet.

“You’re really much too polite for…”

“For what?”

“For an anarchist,” she said, in her thin and affectedly drawling voice (it was the same intonation Pae used, and Oiie when he was at the University). “I’m disappointed. I thought you’d be dangerous and uncouth.”

“I am.”

She glanced up at him sidelong. She wore a scarlet shawl tied over her head; her eyes looked black and bright against the vivid color and the whiteness of snow all around.

“But here you are tamely walking me to the station, Dr. Shevek.”

“Shevek,” he said mildly. “No’doctor.’”

“Is that your whole name — first and last?”

He nodded, smiling. He felt well and vigorous, pleased by the bright air, the warmth of the well-made coat he wore, the prettiness of the woman beside him. No worries or heavy thoughts had hold on him today.

“Is it true that you get your names from a computer?”

“Yes.”

“How dreary, to be named by a machine!”

“Why dreary?”

“It’s so mechanical, so impersonal.”

“But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?”

“No one else? You’re the only Shevek?”

“While I live. There were others, before me.”

“Relatives, you mean?”

“We don’t count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see. I don’t know who they were, except for one, in the early years of the Settlement. She designed a kind of bearing they use in heavy machines, they still call it a ‘shevek.’ ” He smiled again, more broadly. “There is a good immortality!”

Vea shook her head. “Good Lord!” she said. “How do you tell men from women?”

“Well, we have discovered methods…”

After a moment her soft, heavy laugh broke out. She wiped her eyes, which watered in the cold air. “Yes, perhaps you are uncouth!… Did they all take made-up names, then, and learn a made-up language — everything new?”

“The Settlers of Anarres? Yes. They were romantic people, I suppose.”

“And you’re not?”

“No. We are very pragmatic.”

“You can be both,” she said.

He had not expected any subtlety of mind from her. “Yes, that’s true,” he said.

“What’s more romantic than your coming here, all alone, without a coin in your pocket, to plead for your people?”

“And to be spoiled with luxuries while I am here.”

“Luxuries? In university rooms? Good Lord! You poor dear! Haven’t they taken you anywhere decent?”

“Many places, but all the same. I wish I could come to know Nio Esseia better. I have seen only the outside of the city — the wrapping of the package.” He used the phrase because he had been fascinated from the start by the Urrasti habit of wrapping everything up in clean, fancy paper or plastic or cardboard or foil. Laundry, books, vegetables, clothes, medicines, everything came inside layers and layers of wrappings. Even packets of paper were wrapped in several layers of paper. Nothing was to touch anything else. He had begun to feel that he, too, had been carefully packaged.

“I know. They made you go to the Historical Museum, and take a tour of the Dobunnae Monument, and listen to a speech in the Senate!” He laughed, because that had been precisely the itinerary one day last summer. “I know! They’re so stupid with foreigners. I shall see to it that you see the real Nio!”

“I should like that.”

“I know all kinds of wonderful people. I collect people. Here you are trapped among all these stuffy professors and politicians…” She rattled on. He took pleasure in her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and the snow.

They came to the little station of Amoeno. She had her return ticket; the train was due in any moment.

“Don’t wait, you’ll freeze.”

He did not reply but just stood, bulky in the fleece-lined coat, looking amiably at her.

She looked down at the cuff of her coat and brushed a speck of snow off the embroidery.

“Have you a wife, Shevek?”

“No.”

“No family at all?”

“Oh — yes. A partner; our children. Excuse me, I was thinking of something else. A wife, you see. I think of that as something that exists only on Urras.”

“What’s a ‘partner’?” She glanced up mischievously into his face.

“I think you would say a wife or husband.”

“Why didn’t she come with you?”

“She did not want to; and the younger child is only one… no, two, now. Also—” He hesitated.

“Why didn’t she want to come?”

“Well, there she has work to do, not here. If I had known how she would like so many things here, I would have asked her to come. But I did not. There is the question of safety, you see.”

“Safety here?”

He hesitated again, and finally said, “Also when I go home.”

“What will happen to you?” Vea asked, round-eyed. The train was pulling over the hill outside town.

“Oh, probably nothing. But there are some who consider me a traitor. Because I try to make friends with Urras, you see. They might make trouble when I go home. I don’t want that for her and the children. We had a little of it before I left. Enough.”

“You’ll be in actual danger, you mean?”

He bent toward her to hear, for the train was pulling into the station with a clatter of wheels and carriages. “I don’t know,” he said, smiling. “You know, our trains look very much like these? A good design need not change.” He went with her to a first-class carriage. Since she did not open the door, he did. He put his head in after her, looking around the compartment. “Inside they are not alike, though! This is all private — for yourself?”

“Oh, yes. I detest second class. Men chewing maera-gum and spitting. Do people chew maera on Anarres? No, surely not. Oh, there are so many things I’d love to know about you and your country!”

“I love to tell about it, but nobody asks.”

“Do let’s meet again and talk about it, then! When you’re next in Nio, will you call me? Promise.”

“I promise,” he said good-naturedly.

“Good! I know you don’t break promises. I don’t know anything about you yet, except that. I can see that. Goodbye, Shevek.” She put her gloved hand on his for a moment as he held the door. The engine gave its two-note honk; he shut the door, and watched the train pull out. Vea’s face a flicker of white and scarlet at the window.

He walked back to the Oiies’ in a very cheerful frame of mind, and had a snowball battle with Ini until dark.

The birdseed paper was excited into its hugest typeface. Spelling and grammar fell by the wayside; it read like Efor talking: “By last night rebels hold all west of Meskti and pushing army hard…” It was the verbal mode of the Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged unstable present tense.

Shevek read the papers and looked up a description of Benbili in the CWG Encyclopedia. The nation was in form a parliamentary democracy, in fact a military dictatorship, run by generals. It was a large country in the western hemisphere, mountains and arid savannahs, underpopulated, poor. “I should have gone to Benbili,” Shevek thought, for the idea of it drew him; he imagined pale plains, the wind blowing. The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale. Its reports, and those of the official telefax in public rooms, were brief and dry: a queer contrast to the popular papers, which shouted Revolution! on every page.