He nodded.
“It would make a league of worlds possible. A federation. We have been held apart by the years, the decades between leaving and arriving, between question and response. It’s as if you had invented human speech! We can talk — at last we can talk together.”
“And what will you say?”
His bitterness startled Keng. She looked at him and said nothing.
He leaned forward in his chair and rubbed his forehead painfully. “Look,” he said, “I must explain to you why I have come to you, and why I came to this world also. I came for the idea. For the sake of the idea. To learn, to teach, to share in the idea. On Anarres, you see, we have cut ourselves off. We don’t talk with other people, the rest of humanity. I could not finish my work there. And if I had been able to finish it, they did not want it, they saw no use in it. So I came here. Here is what I need — the talk, the sharing, an experiment in the Light Laboratory that proves something it wasn’t meant to prove, a book of Relativity Theory from an alien world, the stimulus I need. And so I finished the work, at last. It is not written out yet, but I have the equations and the reasoning, it is done. But the ideas in my head aren’t the only ones important to me. My society is also an idea. I was made by it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human solidarity, an important idea. And though I was very stupid I saw at last that by pursuing the one, the physics, I am betraying the other. I am letting the propertarians buy the truth from me.”
“What else could you do, Shevek?”
“Is there no alternative to selling? Is there not such a thing as the gift?”
“Yes—”
“Do you not understand that I want to give this to you — and to Hain and the other worlds — and to the countries of Urras? But to you alü So that one of you cannot use it, as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit, but only for the common good.”
“In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only the common good,” Keng said.
“In the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the end. I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master.”
Keng’s calmness was a much more forced, willed affair than it had been at the beginning of their talk. The strength of Shevek’s personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable. She was shaken by him, and looked at him with compassion and a certain awe.
“What is it like,” she said, “what can it be like, the society that made you? I heard you speak of Anarres, in the Square, and I wept listening to you, but I didn’t really believe you. Men always speak so of their homes, of the absent land… But you are not like other men. There is a difference in you.”
“The difference of the idea,” he said. “It was for that idea that I came here, too. For Anarres. Since my people refuse to look outward, I thought I might make others look at us. I thought it would be better not to hold apart behind a wall, but to be a society among the others, a world among the others, giving and taking. But there I was wrong — I was absolutely wrong.”
“Why so? Surely—”
“Because there is nothing, nothing on Urras that we Anarresti need! We left with empty hands, a hundred and seventy years ago, and we were right We took nothing. Because there is nothing here but States and their weapons, the rich and their lies, and the poor and their misery. There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate1 them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box — Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man. A man whose hand was shot off because he held it out to others. I have been in Hell at last. Desar was right; it is Urras; Hell is Urras.”
For all his passion he spoke simply, with a kind of humility, and again the Ambassador from Terra watched him with a guarded yet sympathetic wonder, as if she had no idea how to take that simplicity.
“We are both aliens here, Shevek,” she said at last. “I from much farther away in space and time. Yet I begin to think that I am much less alien to Urras than you are… Let me tell you how this world seems to me. To me, and to all my fellow Terrans who have seen the planet, Urras; is the kindliest, most various, most beautiful of all the inhabited worlds. It is the world that comes as close as any could to Paradise.”
She looked at him calmly and keenly; he said nothing.
“I know it’s full of evils, full of human injustice, greed, folly, waste. But ft is also full of good, of beauty, vitality, achievement. It is what a world should be! It is alive, tremendously alive — alive, despite all its evils, with hope:. Is that not true?”
He nodded.
“Now, you man from a world I cannot even imagine, you who see my Paradise as Hell, will you ask what my world must be like?”
He was silent, watching her, his light eyes steady.
“My world, my Earth, is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. There are no forests left on my Earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot. It is habitable, it is still habitable, but not as this world is. This is a living world, a harmony. Mine is a discord. You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert… We survive there, as you do. People are tough! There are nearly a half billion of us now. Once there were nine billion. You can see the old cities still everywhere. The bones and bricks go to dust, but the little pieces of plastic never do — they never adapt either. We failed as a species, as a social species. We are here now, dealing as equals with other human societies on other worlds, only because of the charity of the Hainish. They came; they brought us help. They built ships and gave-them to us, so we could leave our ruined world. They treat us gently, charitably, as the strong man treats the sick one. They are a very strange people, the Hainish; older than any of us; infinitely generous. They are altruists. They are moved by a guilt we don’t even understand, despite all our crimes. They are moved in all they do, I think, by the past, their endless past Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labor force. The absolute regimentation of each life toward the goal of racial survival. We had achieved that much, when the Hainish came. They brought us… a little more hope. Not very much. We have outlived it… We can only look at this splendid world, this vital society, this Urras, this Paradise, from the outside. We are capable-only of admiring it, and maybe envying it a little. Not very much.”
“Then Anarres, as you heard me speak of it — what would Anarres mean to you, Keng?”
“Nothing. Nothing, Shevek. We forfeited our chance for Anarres centuries ago, before it ever came into being.”
Shevek got up and went over to the window, one of the long horizontal window slits of the tower. There was si niche in the wall below it, into which an archer would step up to look down and aim at assailants at the gate; if one did not take that step up one could see nothing from it but the sunwashed, slightly misty sky. Shevek stood below the window gazing out, the light filling his eyes.