When they were alone, evenings, Sadik was often the, subject of their talk. Takver was somewhat overabsorbed in the child, for want of other intimacies, and her strong common sense was obscured by maternal ambitions and anxieties. This was not natural to her; neither competitiveness nor protectiveness was a strong motive in Anarresti life. She was glad to talk her worries out and get rid of them, which Shevek’s presence enabled her to do. The first nights, she did most of the talking, and he listened as he might have listened to music or to running; water, without trying to reply. He had not talked very much, for four years now; he was out of the habit of conversation. She released him from that silence, as she had always done. Later, it was he who talked the most, though always dependent on her response.

“Do you remember Tirin?” he asked one night It was cold; winter had arrived, and the room, the farthest from the domicile furnace, never got very warm, even with the register wide open. They had taken the bedding from both platforms and were well cocooned together on the platform nearer the register. Shevek was wearing a very old, much-washed shirt to keep his chest warm, as he liked to sit up in bed. Takver, wearing nothing, was under the blankets from the ears down. “What became of the orange blanket?” she said.

“What a propertarian! I left it,”

“To Mother Envy? How sad, I’m not a propertarian. I’m just sentimental. It was the first blanket we slept under.”

“No, it wasn’t We must have used a blanket up in the Ne Theras.”

“If we did, I don’t remember it” Takver laughed. “Who did you ask about?”

“Tirin.”

“Don’t remember.”

“At Northsetting Regional. Dark boy, snub nose—”

“Oh, Tirin! Of course. I was thinking of Abbenay.”

“I saw him, in Southwest.”

“You saw Tirin? How was he?”

Shevek said nothing for a while, tracing out the weave of the blanket with one finger. “Remember what Bedap told us about him?”

“That he kept getting kleggich postings, and moving around, and finally went to Segvina Island, didn’t he? And then Dap lost track of him.”

“Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”

“At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty — Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ” must not! It is not moral! It is not good business? Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”

“He played the Urrasti?”

“Yes. He was marvelous.”

“He showed me the play. Several times.”

“Where did you meet him? In Grand Valley?”

“No, before, in Elbow. He was janitor for the mill.”

“Had he chosen that?”

“I don’t think Tir was able to choose at all, by then… Bedap always thought that he was forced to go to Segvina, that he was bullied into asking for therapy. I don’t know. When I saw him, several years after therapy, he was a destroyed person.”

“You think they did something at Segvina—!”

“I don’t know; I think the Asylum does try to offer shelter, a refuge. To judge from their syndical publications, they’re at least altruistic. I doubt that they drove Tir over the edge.”

“But what did break him, then? Just not finding a posting he wanted?”

“The play broke him.”

“The play? The fuss those old turds made about it? Oh, but listen, to be driven crazy by that kind of moralistic scolding you’d have to be crazy already. All he had to do was ignore itl”

“Tir was crazy already. By our society’s standards.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think Tir’s a bora artist. Not a craftsman — a creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who’s got to turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man •who praises through rage.”

“Was the play that good?” Takver asked naively, coming out an inch or two from the blankets and studying Shevek’s profile.

“No, I don’t think so. It must have been funny on stage. He was only twenty when he wrote it, after all. He keeps writing it over. He’s never written anything else.”

“He keeps writing the same play?”

“He keeps writing the same play.”

“Ugh,” Takver said with pity and disgust.

“Every couple of decads he’d come and show it to me. And I’d read it or make a show of reading it and try to talk with him about it He wanted desperately to talk about it, but he couldn’t He was too frightened.”

“Of what? I don’t understand.”

“Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the human race, the brotherhood that rejected him. When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened.”

“You mean, just because some people called his play immoral and said he shouldn’t get a teaching posting, he decided everybody was against him? That’s a bit silly!”

“But who was for him?”

“Dap was — all his friends.”

“But he lost them. He got posted away.”

“Why didn’t he refuse the posting, then?”

“Listen, Takver. I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. You said it — yon should have refused to to to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I’m a cee man, I didn’t have to come here!… We always think it, and say it, but we don’t do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, ‘don’t have to do anything, I make my own choices, I’m free.’ And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where FDC posts us, and stay till we’re reposted.”

“Oh, Shev, that’s not true. Only since the drought. Before that there wasn’t half so much posting. People just worked up jobs where they wanted them, and joined a syndicate or formed one, and then registered with Div-lab. Divlab mostly posted people who preferred to be in General Labor Fool. It’s going to go back to that again, now.”

“I don’t know. It ought to, of course. But even before the famine it wasnt going in that direction, but away from it Bedap was right: every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this is the •way it was done, this is the way it is done, this is the way it has to be done… There was a lot of that, before the drought Five years of stringent control may have fixed the pattern permanently. Don’t look so skeptical! Listen, you tell me, how many people do you know who refused to accept a posting — even before the famine?”

Takver considered the question. “Leaving out nuchnibi?”

HNo, no. Nuchnibi are important.”

“Well, several of Dap’s friends — that nice composer, Salas, and some of the scruffy ones too. And real nuchnibi used to come through Round Valley when I was a kid. Only they cheated, I always thought They told such lovely lies and stories, and told fortunes, everybody was glad to .see them and keep them and feed them as long as they’d )stay. But they never would stay long. But then people would just pick up and leave town, kids usually, some of them just hated farm work, and they’d just quit their posting and leave. People do that everywhere, all the time. They move on, looking for something better. You just don’t call it refusing posting!”