“No, no. How can you understand, coming from the Moon? And you’re only a man, anyway… I’ll tell you something, though. If you took one of your ‘sisters’ up there on the Moon, and gave her a chance to take off her boots, and have an oil bath and a depilation, and put on a pair of pretty sandals, and a belly jewel, and perfume, she’d love it. And you’d love it too! Oh, you would! But you won’t, you poor things with your theories. All brothers and sisters and no fun!”
“You are right,” Shevek said. “No fun. Never. All day long on Anarres we dig lead in the bowels of the mines, and when night comes, after our meal of three holum grains cooked in one spoonful of brackish water, we antiphonally recite the Sayings of Odo, until it is time to go to bed. Which we all do separately, and wearing boots.”
His fluency in Iotic was not sufficient to permit him the word flight this might have been in his own language, one of his sudden fantasies which only Takver and Sadik had heard often enough to get used to; but, lame as it was, it startled Vea. Her dark laugh broke out, heavy and spontaneous. “Good Lord, you’re funny, too! Is there anything you aren’t?”
“A salesman,” he said.
She studied him, smiling. There was something professional, actress-like, in her pose. People do not usually gaze at one another intently at very close range, unless they are mothers with infants, or doctors with patients, or lovers.
He sat up. “I want to walk more,” he said.
She reached up her hand for him to take and help her rise. The gesture was indolent and inviting, but she said with an uncertain tenderness in her voice, “You really are like a brother… Take my hand. I’ll let you go again!”
They wandered along the paths of the great garden. They went into the palace, preserved as a museum of the ancient times of royalty, as Vea said she loved to look at the jewelry there. Portraits of arrogant lords and princes stared at them from the brocade-covered walls and the carven chimneypieces. The rooms were full of silver, gold, crystal, rare woods, tapestries, and jewels. Guards stood behind the velvet ropes. The guards’ black and scarlet uniforms consorted well with the splendors, the hangings of spun gold, the counterpanes of woven feathers, but their faces did not match; they were bored faces, tired, tired of standing all day among strangers doing a useless task. Shevek and Vea came to a glass case in which lay the cloak of Queen Teaea, made of the tanned skins of rebels flayed alive, which that terrible and defiant woman had worn when she went among her plague-stricken people to pray God to end the pestilence, fourteen hundred years ago. “It looks awfully like goatskin to me,” Vea said, examining the discolored, time-tattered rag in the glass case. She glanced up at Shevek. “Are you all right?”
“I think I would like to go outside this place.”
Once outside in the garden his face became less white, but he looked back at the palace walls with hatred. “Why do you people cling to your shame?” he said,
“But it’s all just history. Things like that couldn’t happen now!”
She took him to a matinee at the theater, a comedy about young married people and their mothers-in-law, full of jokes about copulation which never mentioned copulation. Shevek attempted to laugh when Vea did. After that they went to a downtown restaurant, a place of incredible opulence. The dinner cost a hundred units. Shevek ate very little of it, having eaten at noon, but he gave in to Vea’s urging and drank two or three glasses of wine, which was pleasanter than he had expected it to be, and seemed to have no deleterious effect on his thinking. He had not enough money to pay for the dinner, but Vea made no offer to share the cost, merely suggesting that he write a check, which he did. They then took a hired car to Vea’s apartment; she also let him pay the driver. Could it be, he wondered, that Vea was actually a prostitute, that mysterious entity? But prostitutes as Odo wrote of them were poor women, and surely Vea was not poor; “her” party, she had told him, was being got ready by “her” cook, “her” maid, and “her” caterer. Moreover men at the University spoke of prostitutes contemptuously as dirty creatures, while Vea, despite her continual allurements, displayed such sensitivity to open talk about anything sexual that Shevek watched his language with her as he might have done, at home, with a shy child of ten. All together, he did not know what exactly Vea was.
Vea’s rooms were large and luxurious, with glittering views of the lights of Nio, and furnished entirely in white, even the carpeting. But Shevek was getting callous to luxury, and besides was extremely sleepy. The guests were not due to arrive for an hour. While Vea was changing her clothes, he fell asleep in a huge white armchair in the living room. The maid rattling something on the table woke him in time to see Vea come back in, dressed now in Ioti formal evening wear for women, a full-length pleated skirt draped from the hips, leaving the whole torso naked. In her navel a little jewel glittered, just as in the pictures he had seen with Tirin and Bedap a quarter-century ago at the Northsetting Regional Institute of Science, just so… Half awake and wholly roused, he stared at her.
She gazed back at him, smiling a little.
She sat down on a low, cushioned stool near him, so she could look up into his face. She arranged her white skirt over her ankles, and said, “Now, tell me how it really is between men and women on Anarres.”
It was unbelievable. The maid and the caterer’s man were both in the room; she knew he had a partner, and he knew she did; and not a word about copulating had passed between them. Yet her dress, movements, tone — what were they but the most open invitation?
“Between a man and a woman there is what they want there to be between them,” he said, rather roughly. “Each, and both.”
“Then it’s true, you really have no morality?” she asked, as if shocked but delighted.
“I don’t know what you mean. To hurt a person there is the same as to hurt a person here.”
“You mean you have all the same old rules? You see, I believe that morality is just another superstition, like religion. It’s got to be thrown out.”
“But my society,” he said, completely puzzled, “is an attempt to reach it. To throw out the moralizing, yes — the rules, the laws, the punishments — so that men can see good and evil and choose between them.”
“So you threw out all the do’s and don’ts. But you know, I think you Odonians missed the whole point. You threw out the priests and judges and divorce laws and all that, but you kept the real trouble behind them. You just stuck it inside, into your consciences. But it’s still there.
You’re just as much slaves as ever! You aren’t really free.”
“How do you know?”
“I read an article in a magazine about Odonianism,” she said. “And we’ve been together all day. I don’t know you, but I know some things about you. I know that you’ve got a — a Queen Teaea inside you, right inside that hairy head of yours. And she orders you around just like the old tyrant did her serfs. She says, ‘Do this!’ and you do, and ‘Don’t!’ and you don’t.”
“That is where she belongs,” he said, smiling. “Inside my head.”
“No. Better to have her in a palace. Then you could rebel against her. You would have! Your great-greatgrandfather did; at least he ran off to the Moon to get away. But he took Queen Teaea with him, and you’ve still got her!”
“Maybe. But she has learned, on Anarres, that if she tells me to hurt another person, I hurt myself.”
“The same old hypocrisy. Life is a fight, and the strongest wins. All civilization does is hide the blood and cover up the hate with pretty words!”
“Your civilization, perhaps. Ours hides nothing. It is all plain. Queen Teaea wears her own skin, there. We follow one law, only one, the law of human evolution.”