He occasionally spoke to his companion, too, as it got darker. The man was lying now with his eyes open, and he moaned a couple of times in a way that touched Shevek, a childish, patient sort of moan. He had made a gallant effort to keep up and keep going, all the time they were In the first panic of the crowd forcing into and through the Directorate, and running, and then walking towards Old Town; he had held the hurt hand under his coat, pressed against his side, and had done his best to keep going and not to hold Shevek back. The second time he moaned, Shevek took his good hand and whispered, “Don’t, don’t. Be quiet, brother,” only because he could not bear to hear the man’s pain and not be able to do anything for him. The man probably thought he meant he should be quiet lest be give them away to the police, for he nodded weakly and shut his lips together.

The two of them endured there three nights. During all that time there was sporadic fighting in the warehouse district, and the army blockade remained across that block of Mesee Boulevard. The fighting never came very close to it, and it was strongly manned, so the men in hiding had no chance to get out without surrendering themselves. Once when his companion was awake Shevek asked him, “’If we went out to the police what would they do with us?”

The man smiled and whispered, “Shoot us.”

As there had been scattered gunfire around, near and far, for hours, and an occasional solid explosion, and the clacking of the helicopters, his opinion seemed well founded. The reason for his smile was less clear.

He died of loss of blood that night, while they lay side by side for warmth on the mattress Shevek had made from packing-crate straw. He was already stiff when Shevek woke, and sat up, and listened to the silence in the great dark basement and outside on the street and in all the city, a silence of death.

Chapter 10

“Nothing you can do with Southwest,” said the driver, “but get across it.”

Rail lines in Southwest ran for the most part on embankments a meter or more above the plain. There was less dust drift on an elevated roadbed, and it gave travelers a good view of desolation.

Southwest was the only one of the eight Divisions of Anarres that lacked any major body of water. Marshes were formed by polar melt in summer in the far south; towards the equator there were only shallow alkaline lakes in vast salt pans. There were no mountains; every hundred kilometers or so a chain of hills ran north-south, barren, cracked, weathered into cliffs and pinnacles, They were streaked with violet and red, and on cliff faces the rockmoss, a plant that lived in any extreme of heat, cold, aridity, and wind, grew in bold verticals of grey-green, making a plaid with the striations of the sandstone. There was no other color in the landscape but dun, fading to whitish where salt pans lay half covered with sand. Rare thunderclouds moved over the plains, vivid white in the purplish sky. They cast no ram, only shadows. The embankment and the glittering rails ran straight behind the truck train to the end of sight and straight before it to the end of sight.

His companion did not answer, having fallen asleep. His head jiggled to the vibration of the engine. His hands, work-hard and blackened by frostbite, lay loose on his thighs; his face in relaxation was lined and sad. He had hitched the ride in Copper Mountain, and since there were no other passengers the driver had asked him to ride in the cab for company. He had gone to sleep at once. The driver glanced at him from time to time with disappointment but sympathy. He had seen so many worn-out people in the last years that it seemed the normal condition to him.

Late in the long afternoon the man woke up, and after staring out at the desert a while he asked, “You always do this run alone?”

“Last three, four years.”

“Ever break down out here?”

“Couple of times. Plenty of rations and water in the locker. You hungry, by the way?”

“Not yet”

“They send down the breakdown rig from Lonesome within a day or so.”

“That’s the next settlement?”

“Right Seventeen hundred kilometers from Sedep Mines to Lonesome. Longest run between towns on Anarres. I’ve been doing it for eleven years.”

“Not tired of it?”

“No. Like to run a job by myself.”

The passenger nodded agreement.

“And it’s steady. I like routine; you can think. Fifteen days on the run, fifteen off with the partner in New Hope. Year in, year out; drought, famine, whatever. Nothing changes, it’s always drought down here. I like the run. Get the water out, will you? Cooler’s back underneath the locker.”

They each had a long swig from the bottle. The water had a flat, alkaline taste, but was cool. “Ah, that’s good!” the passenger said gratefully. He put the bottle away and, returning to his seat in the front of the cab, stretched, bracing his hands against the roof. “You’re a partnered man, then,” he said. There was a simplicity in the way he said it that the driver liked, and he answered, “Eighteen years.”

“Just starting.”

“By damn, I agree with that! Now that’s what some don’t see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around enough in your teens, that’s when you get the most out of it, and also you find out that it’s all pretty much the same damn thing. And a good thing, too! But still, what’s different isn’t the copulating; it’s the other person. And eighteen years is just a start, all right, when it comes to figuring out that difference. At least, if it’s a woman you’re trying to figure out A woman won’t let on to being so puzzled by a man, but maybe they bluff… Anyhow, that’s the pleasure of it The puzzles and the bluffs and the rest of it. The variety. Variety doesn’t come with just moving around. I was all over Anarrea, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I came back here, and I do this run every three decads year in year out through this same desert where you cant tell one sandhill from the next and it’s all the same for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and go home to the same partner — and I never been bored once. It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.”

“That’s it,” said the passenger.

“Where’s the partner?”

“In Northeast. Four years now.”

“That’s too long,” the driver said. “You should have been posted together.”

“Not where I was.”

“Where’s that?”

“Elbow, and then Grand Valley.”

“I heard about Grand Valley.” He now looked at the passenger with the respect due a survivor. He saw the dry look of the man’s tanned skin, a kind of weathering to the bone, which he had seen in others who had come through the famine years in the Dust “We shouldn’t have tried to keep those mills running!”

“We needed the phosphates.”

“But they say, when the provisions train was stopped in Portal, they kept the mills going, and people died of hunger on the job. Just went a little out of the way and lay down and died. Was it like that?”

The man nodded. He said nothing. The driver pressed no further, but said after a while, “I wondered what I’d do if my train ever got mobbed.”

“It never did?”

“No. See, I don’t carry foodstuffs; one truckload, at most, for Upper Sedep. This is an ores run. But if I got on a provisions run, and they stopped me, what would I do? Run ’em down and get the food to where it ought to go? But hell, you going to run down kids, old men? They’re doing wrong but you going to kill em for it? I don’t knowl”

The straight shining rails ran under the wheels. Clouds in the west laid great shivering mirages on the plain, the shadows of dreams of lakes gone dry ten million years ago.