“A syndic, fellow I’ve known for years, he did just that, north of here, in ’66. They tried to take a grain truck off his train. He backed the train, killed a couple of them before they cleared the track, they were like worms in rotten fish, thick, he said. He said, there’s eight hundred people waiting for that grain truck, and how many of them might die if they don’t get it? More than a couple, a lot more. So it looks like he was right. But by damn! I can’t add up figures like that. I don’t know if it’s right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?”
The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations — just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them, I earned them by making lists of who should starve,” The man’s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. “Like you said, I was to count people.”
“You quit?”
“Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There’s always somebody willing to make lists.”
“Now that’s wrong,” the driver said, scowling into the glare. He had a bald brown face and scalp, no hair left between cheeks and occiput, though he wasn’t past his middle forties. It was a strong, hard, and innocent face. “That’s dead wrong. They should have shut the mills down. You can’t ask a man to do that. Aren’t we Odonians? A man can lose his temper, all right. That’s what the people who mobbed trains did. They were hungry, the kids were hungry, been hungry too long, there’s food coming through and its not for you, you lose your temper and go for it. Same thing with the friend, those people were taking apart the tram he was in charge of, he lost his temper and put it in reverse. He didn’t count any noses. Not then! Later, maybe. Because he was sick when he saw what he’d done. But what they had you doing, saying this one lives and that one dies — that’s not a job a person has a right to do, or ask anybody else to do.”
“It’s been a bad time, brother,” the passenger said gently, watching the glaring plain where the shadows of water wavered and drifted with the wind.
The old cargo dirigible wallowed over the mountains and moored in at the airport on Kidney Mountain. Three passengers got off there. Just as the last of them touched ground, the ground picked itself up and bucked. “Earthquake,” he remarked; he was a local coining home. “Damn, look at that dustl Someday well come down here and there won’t be any mountain.”
Two of the passengers chose to wait till the trucks were loaded and ride with them. Shevek chose to walk, since the local said that Chakar was only about six kilometers down the mountain.
The road went in a series of long curves with a short rise at the end of each. The rising slopes to the left of the road and the falling slopes to the right were thick with scrub holum; lines of tall tree holum, spaced just as if they had been planted, followed veins of ground water along the mountainsides. At the crest of a rise Shevek saw the clear gold of sunset above the dark and many-folded hills. There was no sign of mankind here except the road itself, going down into shadow. As he started down, the air grum bled a little and he felt a strangeness: no jolt, no tremor, but a displacement, a conviction that things were wrong. He completed the step he had been making, and the ground was there to meet his foot. He went on; the road stayed lying down. He had been in no danger, but he had never in any danger known himself so close to death. Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind. Shevek felt the cold, clean air in his mouth and lungs. He listened. Remote, a mountain torrent thundered somewhere down in the shadows.
He came in the late dusk to Chakar. The sky was dark violet over the black ridges. Street lamps flared bright and lonely. Housefronts looked sketchy in the artificial light, the wilderness dark behind them. There were many empty lots, many single houses: an old town, a frontier town, isolated, scattered. A woman passing directed Shevek to Domicile Eight: “That way, brother, past the hospital, the end of the street.” The street ran into the dark under the mountainside and ended at the door of a low building. He entered and found a country-town domicile foyer that took him back to his childhood, to the places in Liberty, Drum Mountain, Wide Plains, where he and his father had lived: the dim light, the patched matting; a leaflet describing a local machinists training group, a notice of syndicate meetings, and a flyer for a performance of a play three decads ago, tacked to the announcement board; a framed amateur painting of Odo in prison over the common-room sofa; a homemade harmonium; a list of residents and a notice of hot-water hours at the town baths posted by the door.
Sherat, Takver, No. 3.
He knocked, watching the reflection of the hall light in the dark surface of the door, which did not hang quite true in its frame. A woman said, “Come in!” He opened the door.
The brighter light in the room was behind her. He could not see well enough for a moment to be sure it was Takver. She stood facing him. She reached out, as if to push him away or to take hold of him, an uncertain, unfinished gesture. He took her hand, and then they held each other, they came together and stood holding each other on the unreliable earth.
“Come in,” Takver said, “oh come in, come in.”
Shevek opened his eyes. Farther into the room, which still seemed very bright, he saw the serious, watchful face of a small child.
“Sadik, this is Shevek.”
The child went to Takver, took hold of her leg, and burst into tears.
“But don’t cry, why are you crying, little soul?”
“Why are you?” the child whispered.
“Because I’m happy! Only because I’m happy. Sit on my lap. But Shevek, Shevekl The letter from you only came yesterday. I was going to go by the telephone when I took Sadik home to sleep. You said you’d catt tonight. Not come tonight! Oh, don’t cry, Sadiki, look, I’m not any more, am I?”
“The man cried too.”
“Of course I did.”
Sadik looked at him with mistrustful curiosity. She was four years old. She had a round head, a round face, she was round, dark, furry, soft.
There was no furniture in the room but the two bed platforms. Takver bad sat down on one with Sadik on her lap, Shevek sat down on the other and stretched out his legs. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, and held the knuckles out to show Sadik. “See,” he said, “they’re wet. And the nose dribbles. Do you keep a handkerchief?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“I did, but it got lost in a washhouse.”
“You can share the handkerchief I use,” Sadik said after a pause.
“He doesn’t know where it is,” said Takver.
Sadik got off her mother’s lap and fetched a handkerchief from a drawer in the closet. She gave it to Takver, who passed it across to Shevek. “It’s clean,” Takver said, with her large smile. Sadik watched closely while Shevek wiped his nose.
“Was there an earthquake here a little while ago?” he asked.
“It shakes all the time, you really stop noticing,” Takver said, but Sadik, delighted to dispense information, said in her high but husky voice, “Yes, there was a big one before dinner. When there’s an earthquake the windows go gliggle and the floor waves, and you ought to go into the doorway or outside.”