Takver sighed softly in her sleep, as if agreeing with him, and turned over, pursuing some quiet dream.

Fulfillment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.

Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.

It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

So, looking back on the last four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

Chapter 11

Rodarred, the old capital of Avan Province, was a pointed city: a forest of pines, and above the spires of the pines, an airier forest of towers. The streets were dark and narrow, mossy, often misty, under the trees. Only from the seven bridges across the river could one look up and see the tops of the towers. Some of them were hundreds of feet tall, others were mere shoots, like ordinary houses gone to seed. Some were of stone, others of porcelain, mosaic, sheets of colored glass, sheathings of copper, tin, or gold, ornate beyond belief, delicate, glittering. In these hallucinatory and charming streets the Urrasti Council of World Governments had had its seat for the three hundred years of its existence. Many embassies and consulates to the CWO and to A-Io also clustered in Rodarred, only an hour’s ride from Nio Esseia and the national seat of government.

The Terran Embassy to the CWG was housed in the River Castle, which crouched between the Nio highway and the river, sending up only one squat, grudging tower with a square roof and lateral window slits like narrowed eyes. Its walls had withstood weapons and weathers for fourteen hundred years. Dark trees clustered near its landward side, and between them a drawbridge lay across a moat. The drawbridge was down, and its gates stood open. The moat, the river, the green grass, the black walls, the flag on top of the tower, all glimmered mistily as the sun broke through a river fog, and the bells in all the towers of Rodarred began their prolonged and insanely harmonious task of ringing seven o’clock.

A clerk at the very modern reception desk inside the castle was occupied with a tremendous yawn. “We aren’t really open till eight o’clock,” he said hollowly.

“I want to see the Ambassador.”

“The Ambassador is at breakfast You’ll have to make an appointment.” In saying this the clerk wiped his watery eyes and was able to see the visitor clearly for the first time. He stared, moved his jaw several times, and said, “Who are you? Where — What do you want?”

“I want to see the Ambassador.”

“You just hold on,” the clerk said in the purest Nioti accent, still staring, and put out his hand to a telephone.

A car had just drawn up between the drawbridge gate and the entrance of the Embassy, and several men were getting out of it, the metal fittings of their black coats glittering in the sunlight. Two other men had just entered the lobby from the main part of the building, talking together, strange-looking people, strangely clothed. Shevek hurried around the reception desk towards them, trying to run. “Help mel” he said.

They looked up startled. One drew back, frowning. The other one looked past Shevek at the uniformed group who were just entering the Embassy, “Right in here!’ he said with coolness, took Shevek’s arm, and shut himself and Shevek into a little side office, with two steps and a gesture, as neat as a ballet dancer. “What’s up? You’re from Nio Essela?”

“I want to see the Ambassador.”

“Are you one of the strikers?”

“Shevek. My name is Shevek. From Anarres.”

The alien eyes flashed, brilliant, intelligent, in the jet-black face. “Mai-god!” the Terran said under his breath, and then, in Iotic, “Are you asking asylum?”

“I don’t know. I—”

“Come with me, Dr. Shevek. Ill get you somewhere you can sit down.”

There were halls, stairs, the black man’s hand on his arm.

People were trying to take his coat off. He struggled against them, afraid they were after the notebook in his shirt pocket. Somebody spoke authoritatively in a foreign language. Somebody else said to him, “It’s all right. He’s trying to find out if you’re hurt. Your coat’s bloody.”

“Another man,” Shevek said. “Another man’s blood.”

He managed to sit up, though his head swam. He was on a couch in a large, sunlit room; apparently he had fainted. A couple of men and a woman stood near him. He looked at them without understanding.

“You are in the Embassy of Terra, Dr. Shevek. You are on Terran soil here. You are perfectly safe. You can stay here as long as you want.”

The woman’s skin was yellow-brown, like ferrous earth, and hairless, except on the scalp; not shaven, but hairless. The features were strange and childlike, small mouth, low-bridged nose, eyes with long full lids, cheeks and chin rounded, fat-padded. The whole figure was rounded, supple, childlike.

“You are safe here,” she repeated.

He tried to speak, but could not. One of the men pushed him gently on the chest, saying, “Lie down, lie down.” He lay back, but he whispered, “I want to see the Ambassador.”

“I’m the Ambassador. Keng is my name. We are glad you came to us. You are safe here. Please rest now, Dr. Shevek, and we’ll talk later. There is no hurry.” Her voice had an odd, singsong quality, but it was husky, like Takver’s voice.

“Takver,” he said, in his own language, “I don’t know what to do.”

She said, “Sleep,” and he slept.

After two days sleep and two days’ meals, dressed again in his grey Ioti suit, which they had cleaned and pressed for him, he was shown into the Ambassador’s private salon on the third floor of the tower.

The Ambassador neither bowed to him nor shook his hand, but joined her hands palm to palm before her breast and smiled. “I’m glad you feel better, Dr. Shevek. No, I should say simply Shevek, shouldn’t I? Please sit down. I’m sorry that I have to speak to you in Iotic, a foreign language to both of us. I don’t know your language. I am told that it’s a most interesting one, the only rationally invented language that has become the tongue of a great people.”

He felt big, heavy, hairy, beside this suave alien. He sat down in one of the deep, soft chairs. Keng also sat down, but grimaced as she did so. “I have a bad back,” she said, “from sitting in these comfortable chairs!” And Shevek realized then that she was not a woman of thirty or less, as he had thought, but was sixty or more; her smooth skin and childish physique had deceived him. “At home,” she went on, “we mostly sit on cushions on the floor. But if I did that here I would have to look up even more at everyone. You Cetians are all so tall!… We have a little problem. That is, we really do not, but the government of A-Io does. Your people on Anarres, the ones who maintain radio communication with Unas, you know, have been asking very urgently to speak with you. And the Ioti Government is embarrassed.” She smiled, a smile of pure amusement. “They don’t know what to say.”