She was calm. She was calm as a waterworn stone which, contemplated, calms. Shevek sat back in his chair and took a very considerable time to answer.
“Does the Ioti Government know that I’m here?”
“Well, not officially. We have said nothing, they have not asked. But we have several Ioti clerks and secretaries working here in the Embassy. So, of course, they know.”
“Is it a danger to you — my being here?”
“Oh no. Our embassy is to the Council of World Governments, not to the nation of A-Io. You had a perfect right to come here, which the rest of the Council would force A-Io to admit. And as I told you, this castle is Terran soil.” She smiled again; her smooth face folded into many little creases, and unfolded. “A delightful fantasy of diplomats! This castle eleven light-years from my Earth, this room in a tower in Rodarred, in A-Io, on the planet Urras of the sun Tau Ceti, is Terran soil.”
“Then you can tell them I am here.”
“Good. It will simplify matters. I wanted your consent”
“There was no… message for me, from Anarres?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I didn’t think of it from your point of view. If you are worried about something, we might broadcast to Anarres. We know the wave length your people there have been using, of course, but we haven’t used it because we were not invited to. It seemed best not to press. But we can easily arrange a conversation for you.”
“You have a transmitter?”
“We would relay through our ship — the Hainish ship that stays in orbit around Urras. Hain and Terra work together, you know. The Hainish Ambassador knows you’re with us; he is the only person who has been officially informed. So the radio is at your service.”
He thanked her, with the simplicity of one who does not look behind the offer for the offer’s motive. She studied him for a moment, her eyes shrewd, direct, and quiet. “I heard your speech,” she said.
He looked at her as from a distance. “Speech?”
“When you spoke at the great demonstration in Capitol Square. A week ago today. We always listen to the clandestine radio, the Socialist Workers’ and the Libertarians’ broadcasts. Of course, they were reporting the demonstration. I heard you speak. I was very moved. Then there was a noise, a strange noise, and one could hear the crowd beginning to shout. They did not explain. There was screaming. Then it died off the air suddenly. It was terrible, terrible to listen to. And you were there. How did you escape from that? How did you get out of the city? Old Town is still cordoned off; there are three regiments of the army in Nio; they round up strikers and suspects by the dozen and hundred every day. How did you get here?”
He smiled faintly. “In a taxi.”
“Through all the checkpoints? And in that bloodstained coat? And everyone knows what you look like.”
“I was under the back seat. The taxi was commandeered, is that the word? It was a risk some people took for me.” He looked down at his hands, clasped on his lap. He sat perfectly quietly and spoke quietly, but there was an inner tension, a strain, visible in his eyes and in the lines around his mouth. He thought a while, and went on in the same detached way, “It was luck, at first When I came out of hiding, I was lucky not to be arrested at once. But I got into Old Town. After that it was not just luck. They thought for me where I might go, they planned how to get me there, they took the risks.” He said a word in his own language, then translated it: “Solidarity…”
“It is very strange,” said the Ambassador from Terra. “I know almost nothing about your world, Shevek. I know only what the Urrasti tell us, since your people won’t let us come there. I know, of course, that the planet is arid and bleak, and how the colony was founded, that it is an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism, that it has survived for a hundred and seventy years. I have read a little of Odo’s writings — not very much. I thought that it was all rather unimportant to matters on Urras now, rather remote, an interesting experiment. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? It is important. Perhaps Anarres is the key to Urras… The revolutionists in Nio, they come from that same tradition. They weren’t just striking for better wages or protesting the draft. They are not only socialists, they are anarchists; they were striking against power. You see, the size of the demonstration, the intensity of popular feeling, and the government’s panic reaction, all seemed very hard to understand. Why so much commotion? The government here is not despotic. The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving. Why aren’t they satisfied with bread and speeches? Why are they supersensitive?… Now I begin to see why. But what is still inexplicable is that the government of A-Io, knowing this libertarian tradition was still alive, and knowing the discontent in the industrial cities, still brought you here. Like bringing the match to the powder mill!”
“I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it.”
“Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?”
“With the annihilation of space.”
She was silent a while. “Is that what you do?” she said in her mild, amused voice.
“No. It is not what I do! In the first place, I am not an inventor, an engineer. I am a theorist. What they want from me is a theory. A theory of the General Field in temporal physics. Do you know what that is?”
“Shevek, your Cetian physics, your Noble Science, is completely beyond my grasp. I am not trained in mathematics, in physics, in philosophy, and it seems to consist of all of those, and cosmology, and more besides. But I know what you mean when you say the Theory of Simultaneity, in the way I know what is meant by the Theory of Relativity; that is, I know that relativity theory led to certain great practical results; and so I gather that your temporal physics may make new technologies possible.”
He nodded. “What they want,” he said, “is the instantaneous transferral of matter across space. Transilience. Space travel, you see, without traversal of space or lapse of time. They may arrive at it yet; not from my equations, I think. But they can make the ansible, with my equations, if they want it. Men cannot leap the great gaps, but ideas can.”
“What is an ansible, Shevek?”
“An idea.” He smiled without much humor. “It will be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Like a kind of telephone.”
Keng laughed. “The simplicity of physicists! So I could pick up the — ansible? — and talk with my son in Delhi? And with my granddaughter, who was five when I left, and who lived eleven years while I was traveling from Terra to Unas in a nearly light-speed ship. And I could find out what’s happening at home now, not eleven years ago. And decisions could be made, and agreements reached, and information shared. I could talk to diplomats on Chiffewar, you could talk to physicists on Hain, it wouldn’t take ideas a generation to get from world to world… Do you know, Shevek, I think your very simple matter might change the lives of all the billions of people in the nine Known Worlds?”