“Why not?”

“What are you getting at?” Takver grumbled, retiring further under the blanket.

“Well, this. That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it We don’t cooperate — we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don’t believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, lawa of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we cant see them, because they’re part of our thinking. Tir never did that. I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel He was a natural Odonian — a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for Ms first free act.”

“I don’t think,” Takver said, muffled in the bed, and defensively, “that Tir was a very strong person.”

“’No, he was extremely vulnerable.”

There was a long silence.

“No wonder be haunts you,” she said. “His play. Your book.”

“But I’m luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist cant hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.”

Takver watched him from the corner of her eye for some time, then turned over and sat up, pulling the blanket up around her shoulders. “Err! It’s cold… I was wrong, wasn’t I, about the book. About letting Sabul cut it up and put his name on it. It seemed right It seemed like setting the work before the workman, pride before vanity, community before ego, all that. But it wasn’t really that at all, was it? It was a capitulation. A surrender to Sabul’s authoritarianism.”

“I don’t know. It did get the thing printed.”

“The right end, but the wrong means! I thought about it for a long time, at Rolny, Shev. Ill tell you what was wrong. I was pregnant. Pregnant women have no ethics. Only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse. To hell with the book, and the partnership, and the truth, if they threaten the precious fetus! It’s a racial preservation drive, but it can work right against community; it’s biological, not social. A man can be grateful he never gets into the grip of it. But he’d better realize than a woman can, and watch out for it. I think that’s why the old archisms used women as property. Why did the women let them? Because they were pregnant all the time — because they were already possessed, enslaved!”

“All right, maybe, but our society, here, is a true community wherever it truly embodies Odo’s ideas. It was a woman who made the Promise! What are you doing — indulging guilt feelings? Wallowing?” The word he used was not “wallowing,” there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally “coating continually and thickly with excrement.” The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.

“Well, no. It was lovely, having Sadik! But I was wrong about the book.”

“We were both wrong. We always go wrong together. You don’t really think you made up my mind for me?”

“In that case I think I did.”

“No. The fact is, neither of us made up our mind. Neither of us chose. We let Sabul choose for us. Our own, internalized Sabul — convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being freej Well, never again. I learn slowly, but I learn.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Takver, a thrill of agreeable excitement in her voice.

“Go to Abbenay with you and start a syndicate, a printing syndicate. Print the Principles, uncut. And whatever else we like. Bedap’s Sketch of Open Education in Science, that the PDC wouldn’t circulate. And Tirin’s play. I owe him that. He taught me what prisons are, and who builds them. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I’m going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”

“It may get pretty drafry,” Takver said, huddled in blankets. She leaned against him, and be put his arm around her shoulders. “I expect it will,” he said.

Long after Takver had fallen asleep that night Shevek lay awake, his hands under his bead, looking into darkness, hearing silence. He thought of his long trip out of the Dust, remembering the levels and mirages of the desert, the train driver with the bald, brown head and candid eyes, who had said that one must work with time and not against it.

Shevek had learned something about his own will these last four years. In its frustration he had learned its strength. No social or ethical imperative equaled it. Not even hunger could repress it The less he had, the more absolute became his need to be.

He recognized that need, in Odonian terms, as his “cellular function,” the analogic term for the individual’s individuality, the work he can do best, therefore his best contribution to his society. A healthy society would let him exercise that optimum function freely, in the coordination of all such functions finding its adaptability and strength. That was a central idea of Odo’s Analogy. That the Odonian society on Anarres had fallen short of the ideal did not, in his eyes, lessen his responsibility to it; just the contrary. With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice — the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind.

All this Shevek had thought out, in these terms, for his conscience was a completely Odonian one.

He was therefore certain, by now, that his radical and unqualified will to create was, in Odonian terms, its own justification. His sense of primary responsibility towards his work did not cut him off from his fellows, from his society, as he had thought. It engaged him with them absolutely.

He also felt that a man who had this sense of responsibility about one thing was obliged to carry it through in all things. It was a mistake to see himself as its vehicle and nothing else, to sacrifice any other obligation to it.

That sacrificiality was what Takver had spoken of recognizing in herself when she was pregnant, and she bad spoken with a degree of horror, of self-disgust, because she too was an Odonian, and the separation of means and ends was, to her too, false. For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere. All responsibilities, all commitments thus understood took on substance and duration.

So his mutual commitment with Takver, their relationship, had remained thoroughly alive during their four years’ separation. They had both suffered from it, and suffered a good deal, but it had not occurred to either of them to escape the suffering by denying the commitment.

For after all, he thought now, lying in the warmth of Takver’s sleep, it was joy they were both after — the completeness of being. If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.