“Well, then, who’s ‘she’?”
“I don’t know, it’s just what the song says. Isn’t it what we’re doing here? Bringing green leaves out of stones!”
“Sounds like religion.”
“You and your fancy book-words. It’s just a song. Oh, I wish we were back at the other camp and could have a swim. I stink!”
“I stink.”
“We all stink.”
“In solidarity…”
But this camp was fifteen kilos from the beaches of the Temae, and there was only dust to swim in.
There was a man in camp whose name, spoken, sounded like Shevek’s: Shevet. When one was called the other answered. Shevek felt a kind of affinity for the man, a relation more particular than that of brotherhood, because of this random similarity. A couple of times he saw Shevet eyeing him. They did not speak to each other yet.
Shevek’s first decads in the afforestation project had been spent in silent resentment and exhaustion. People who had chosen to work in centrally functional fields such as physics should not be called upon for these projects and special levies. Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy? The work needed doing, but a lot of people didn’t care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work. In fact, a lot of them could do it better than he could. He had been proud of his strength, and had always volunteered for the “heavies” on tenth-day rotational duty; but here it was day after day, eight hours a day, in dust and heat. All day he would look forward to evening when he could be alone and think, and the instant he got to the sleeping tent after supper his head flopped down and he slept like a stone till dawn, and never a thought crossed his mind.
He found the workmates dull and loutish, and even those younger than himself treated him like a boy. Scornful and resentful, he took pleasure only in writing to his friends Tirin and Rovab in a code they had worked out at the Institute, a set of verbal equivalents to the special symbols of temporal physics. Written out, these seemed to make sense as a message, but were in fact nonsense, except for the equation or philosophical formula they masked. Shevek’s and Rovab’s equations were genuine. Tirin’s letters were very funny and would have convinced anyone that they referred to real emotions and events, but the physics in them was dubious. Shevek sent off one of these puzzles often, once he found that he could work them out in his head while he was digging holes in rock with a dull shovel in a dust storm. Tirin answered several times, Rovab only once. She was a cold girl, he knew she was cold. But none of them at the Institute knew how wretched he was. They hadn’t been posted, just as they were beginning independent research, to a damned tree-planting project. Their central function wasn’t being wasted. They were working: doing what they wanted to do. He was not working. He was being worked.
Yet it was queer how proud you felt of what you got done this way — all together — what satisfaction it gave. And some of the workmates were really extraordinary people. Gimar, for instance. At first her muscular beauty had rather awed him, but now he was strong enough to desire her.
“Come with me tonight, Gimar.”
“Oh, no,” she said, and looked at him with so much surprise that he said, with some dignity of pain, “I thought we were friends.”
“We are.”
“Then—”
“I’m partnered. He’s back home.”
“You might have said,” Shevek said, going red.
“Well, it didn’t occur to me I ought to. I’m sorry, Shev.” She looked so regretfully at him that he said, with some hope, “You don’t think—”
“No, You can’t work a partnership that way, some bits for him and some bits for others.”
“Life partnership is really against the Odonian ethic, I think,” Shevek said, harsh and pedantic.
“Shit,” said Gimar in her mild voice, “Having’s wrong; sharing’s right. What more can you share than your whole self, your whole life, all the nights and all the days?”
He sat with his hands between his knees, his head bowed, a long boy, rawboned, disconsolate, unfinished. “I’m not up to that,” he said after a while.
“You?”
“I haven’t really ever known anybody. You see how I didn’t understand you. I’m cut off. Can’t get in. Never will. It would be silly for me to think about a partnership. That sort of thing is for… for human beings…”
With timidity, not a sexual coyness but the shyness of respect, Gimar put her hand on his shoulder. She did not reassure him. She did not tell him he was like everybody else. She said, “I’ll never know anyone like you again, Shev. I never will forget you.”
All the same, a rejection is a rejection. For all her gentleness he went from her with a lame soul, and angry.
The weather was very hot. There was no coolness except in the hour before dawn.
The man named Shevet came up to Shevek one night after supper. He was a stocky, handsome fellow of thirty. “I’m tired of getting mixed up with you,” he said. “Call yourself something else.”
The surly aggressiveness would have puzzled Shevek earlier. Now he simply responded in kind. “Change your own name if you don’t like it,” he said.
“You’re one of those little profiteers who goes to school to keep his hands clean, “the man said. “I’ve always wanted to knock the shit out of one of you.”
“Don’t call me profiteer!” Shevek said, but this wasn’t a verbal battle. Shevet knocked him double. He got in several return blows, having long arms and more temper than his opponent expected: but he was outmatched. Several people paused to watch, saw that it was a fair fight but not an interesting one, and went on. They were neither offended nor attracted by simple violence. Shevek did not call for help, so it was nobody’s business but his own. When he came to he was lying on his back on the dark ground between two tents.
He had a ringing in his right ear for a couple of days, and a split lip that took long to heal because of the dust, which irritated all sores. He and Shevet never spoke again. He saw the man at a distance, at other cookfires, without animosity. Shevet had given him what he had to give, and he had accepted the gift, though for a long time he never weighed it or considered its nature. By the time he did so there was no distinguishing it from another gift, another epoch in his growing up. A girl, one who had recently joined his work gang, came up to him just as Shevet had in the darkness as he left the cookfire, and his lip wasn’t healed yet… He never could remember what she said; she had teased him; again he responded simply. They went out into the plain in the night, and there she gave him the freedom of the flesh. That was her gift, and he accepted it. Like all children of Anarres he had had sexual experience freely with both boys and girls, but he and they had been children; he had never got further than the pleasure he assumed was all there was to it. Beshun, expert in delight, took him into the heart of sexuality, where there is no rancor and no ineptitude, where the two bodies striving to join each other annihilate the moment in their striving, and transcend the self, and transcend time.
It was all easy now, so easy, and lovely, out in the warm dust, in the starlight. And the days were long, and hot, and bright, and the dust smelled like Beshun’s body.
He worked now in the planting crew. The trucks had come down from Northeast full of tiny trees, thousands of seedlings raised in the Green Mountains, where it rained up to forty inches a year, the rain belt. They planted the little trees in the dust.
When they were done, the fifty crews who had worked the second year of the project drove away in the flatbed trucks, and they looked back as they went. They saw what they had done. There was a mist of green, very faint, on the pallid curves and terraces of the desert. On the dead land lay, very lightly, a veil of life. They cheered, sang, shouted from truck to truck. Tears came into Shevek’s eyes. He thought, She brings the green leaf from the stone… Gimar had been posted back to Southrising a long time ago. “What are you making faces about?” Beshun asked him, squeezing next to him, as the truck jounced and running her hand up and down his hard, dust-whitened arm.