Rulag replied, as quietly as he, but very coldly, “you have no right to involve us all in a risk that private motives compel you to take.”
“No one who will not go as far as I’m willing to go has any right to stop me from going,” Shevek answered. Their eyes met for a second; both looked down.
“The risk of a trip to Urras involves nobody but the person going,” Bedap said. “It changes nothing in the Terms of the Settlement, and nothing in our relationship with Urras, except, perhaps, morally — to our advantage. But I don’t think we’re ready, any of us, to decide on it 1’H withdraw tide topic for the present, if it’s agreeable to the rest of you.”
They assented, and he and Shevek left the meeting.
“I’ve got to go over to the Institute,” Shevek said as they came out of the PDC building. “Sabul sent me one of his toenail clippings — first in years. What’s on his mind, I wonder?”
“What’s on that woman Rulag’s mind, I wonder! She’s got a personal grudge against you. Envy, I suppose. We won’t put you two across a table again, or we’ll get nowhere. Though that young fellow from Northrising was bad news, too. Majority rule and might makes right! Are we going to get our message across, Shev? Or are we only hardening the opposition to it?”
“We may really have to send somebody off to Urras — prove our right to by acts, if words won’t do it.”
“Maybe. So long as it isn’t me! I’ll talk myself purple about our right to leave Anarres, but if I had to do it, by damn, I’d slit my throat”
Shevek laughed. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be home in an hour or so. Come eat with us tonight.”
“Ill meet you at the room.”
Shevek set off down the street with his long stride; Bedap stood hesitating in front of the PDC building. It was midafternoon, a windy, sunny, cold spring day. The streets of Abbenay were bright, scoured-looking, alive with light and people. Bedap felt both excited and let down. Everything, including his emotions, was promising yet unsatisfactory. He went off to the domicile in the Pekesh Block where Shevek and Takver now lived, and found, as he had hoped, Takver at home with the baby.
Takver had miscarried twice and then Pilun had come along, late and a little unexpected, but very welcome. She had been small at birth and now, getting on to two, was still small, with thin arms and legs. When Bedap held her he was always vaguely frightened of or repelled by the feeling of those arms, so fragile that he could have broken them simply with a twist of his hand. He was very fond of Pilun, fascinated by her cloudy grey eyes and won by her utter trustfulness, but whenever he touched her he knew consciously, as he had not done before, what the attraction of cruelty is, why the strong torment the weak. And therefore — though he could not have said why “therefore” — he also understood something that had never made much sense to him, or interested him at all: parental feeling. It gave him a most extraordinary pleasure when Pilun called him “tadde.”
He sat down on the bed platform under the window. It was a good-sized room with two platforms. The floor was matted; there was no other furniture, no chairs or tables, only a little movable fence that marked off a play space or screened Pilun’s bed. Takver had the long, wide drawer of the other platform open, sorting piles of papers kept in it. “Do hold Pilun, dear Dap.” she said with her large smile, when the baby began working towards him. “She’s been into these papers at least ten times, every time I get them sorted ill be done in just a minute here — ten minutes.”
“don’t hurry. I don’t want to talk. I just want to sit here. Come on, Pilun. Walk — there’s a girt! Walk k› Tadde Dap. Now I’ve got you!”
Pilun sat contentedly on his knees and studied his hand. Bedap was ashamed of his nails, which he no longer bit! but which remained deformed from biting, and at first he-closed his hand to hide them; then he was ashamed of shame, and opened up his hand. Pilun patted it.
“This is a nice room,” he said. “With the north light It’s always calm in here.”
“Yes. Sth, I’m counting these.”
After a while she put the piles of paper away and shut the drawer. “There! Sony. I told Shev I’d page that article for him. How about a drink?”
Rationing was still in force on many staple foods, though much less strict than it had been five years before. The fruit orchards of Northrising had suffered less and recovered quicker from the drought than the grain-growing regions, and last year dried fruits and fruit juices had gone oflE the restricted list. Takver had a bottle standing in the shaded window. She poured them each a cupful, in rather lumpy earthenware cups which Sadik had made at school. She sat down opposite Bedap and looked at him, smiling. “Well, how’s it going at PDC?”
“Same as ever. How’s the fish lab?”
Takver looked down into her cup, moving it to catch the light on the surface of the liquid. “I don’t know. I’m thinking of quitting.”
“Why, Takver?”
“Rather quit than be told to. The trouble is, I like that job, and I’m good at it. And it’s the only one like it in Abbenay. But you can’t be a member of a research team that’s decided you’re not a member of it.”
“They’re coming down harder on you, are they?”
“All the time,” she said, and looked rapidly and tin-consciously at the door, as if to be sure that Shevek wai not there, hearing. “Some of them are unbelievable. Well, you know. There’s no use going on about it.”
“No, that’s why I’m glad to catch you alone. I don’t really know. I, and Shev, and Skovan, and Gezach, and the rest of us who spend most of the time at the printing shop or the radio tower, don’t have postings, and so we don’t see much of people outside the Syndicate of Initiative. I’m at PDC a lot, but that’s a special situation, I expect opposition there because I create it. What is it that you run up against?”
“Hatred,” Takver said, in her dark, soft voice. “Real hatred. The director of my project won’t speak to me any more. Well, that’s not much loss. He’s a stick anyhow. But some of the others do tell me what they think… There’s a woman, not at the fish labs, here in the dom. I’m on the block sanitation committee and I had to go speak to her about something. She wouldn’t let me talk. ‘Don’t you try to come into this room, I know you, you damned traitors, you intellectuals, you egoizers’ and so on and so on, and then slammed the door. It was grotesque.” Takvec laughed without humor. Pilun, seeing her laugh, smiled as’ she sat curled in the angle of Bedap’s arm, and then yawned, “But you know, it was frightening. I’m a coward, Dap. I don’t like violence. I don’t even like disapproval I”
“Of course not. The only security we have is our neighbors’ approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can’t ‘break’ a custom; it’s the framework of your life with other people. We’re only just beginning to feel what it’s like to be revolutionaries, as Sfaev put it in the meeting today. And it isn’t comfortable.”
“Some people understand,” Takver said with determined optimism. “A woman on the omnibus yesterday, I don’t know where I’d met her, tenth-day work some time, I suppose; she said, ‘It must be wonderful to live with a great scientist, it must be so interesting!’ And I said, “Yes, at least there’s always something to talk about” … Pilun, don’t go to sleep, baby! Shevek will be home soon and well go to commons. Jiggle her, Dap. Well, anyway, you see, she knew who Shev was, but she wasn’t hateful or disapproving, she was very nice.”
“People do know who he is,” Bedap said. “It’s funny, because they can’t understand his books any more than I can. A few hundred do, he thinks. Those students in the Divisional Institutes who try to organize Simultaneity courses. I think a few dozen would be a liberal estimate, myself. And yet people know of him, they have this feeling he’s something to be proud of. That’s one thing the Syndicate has done, I suppose, if nothing else. Printed Shev’s books. It may be the only wise thing we’ve done.”