She pushed across the table a ragged bit of paper, evidently a corner torn off a larger piece. On it in tiny scribbled characters was one equation:
Shevek put his weight on his hands on the table and looked down at the bit of paper with a steady gaze. His eyes were light, and the light from the window filled them so they seemed clear as water. He was nineteen, Mitis fifty-five. She watched him with compassion and admiration.
“That’s what’s missing,” he said. His hand had found a pencil on the table. He began scribbling on the fragment of paper. As he wrote, his colorless face, silvered with fine short hair, became flushed, and his ears turned red.
Mitis moved surreptitiously around behind the table to sit down. She had circulatory trouble in her legs, and needed to sit down. Her movement, however, disturbed Shevek. He looked up with a cold annoyed stare.
“I can finish this in a day or two,” he said.
“Sabul wants to see the results when you’ve worked it out.”
There was a pause. Shevek’s color returned to normal, and he became aware again of the presence of Mitis, whom he loved. “Why did you send the paper to Sabul?” he asked. “With that big hole in it!” He smiled; the pleasure of patching the hole in his thinking made him radiant.
“I thought he might see where you went wrong. I couldn’t. Also I wanted him to see what you were after… He’ll want you to come there, to Abbenay, you know.”
The young man did not answer.
“Do you want to go?”
“Not yet.”
“So I judged. But you must go. For the books, and for the minds you’ll meet there. You will not waste that mind in a desert!” Mitis spoke with sudden passion. “It’s your duty to seek out the best, Shevek. Don’t let false egalitarianism ever trick you. You’ll work with Sabul, he’s good, he’ll work you hard. But you should be free to find the line you want to follow. Stay here one more quarter, then go. And take care, in Abbenay. Keep free. Power inheres in a center. You’re going to the center. I don’t know Sabul well; I know nothing against him; but keep this in mind: you will be his man.”
The singular forms of the possessive pronoun in Pravic were used mostly for emphasis; idiom avoided them. Little children might say “my mother,” but very soon they learned to say “the mother.” Instead of “my hand hurts,” it was “the hand hurts me,” and so on; to say “this one is mine and that’s yours” in Pravic, one said. “I use this one and you use that” Mitis’s statement, “You will be his man,” had a strange sound to it. Shevek looked at her blankly.
“There’s work for you to do,” Mitis said. She had black eyes, they flashed as if with anger. “Do it!” Then she went out, for a group was waiting for her in the lab. Confused, Shevek looked down at the bit of scribbled paper. He thought Mitis had been telling him to hurry up and correct his equations. It was not till much later that he understood what she had been telling him.
The night before he left for Abbenay his fellow students gave a party for him. Parties were frequent, on slight pretexts, but Shevek was surprised by the energy that went into this one, and wondered why it was such a fine one. Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him.
Many of them must have saved up daily allowances for the party for days before. There were incredible amounts of food. The order for pastries was so large that the refectory baker had let his fancy loose and produced hitherto unknown delights: spiced wafers, little peppered squares to go with the smoked fish, sweet fried cakes, succulently greasy. There were fruit drinks, preserved fruit from the Reran Sea region, tiny salt shrimp, piles of crisp sweet-potato chips. The rich plentiful food was intoxicating. Everybody got very merry, and a few got sick.
There were skits and entertainments, rehearsed and impromptu. Tirin. got himself up in a collection of rags from the recycle bin and wandered among them as the Poor Urrasti, the Beggarman — one of the Iotic words everybody had learned in history. “Give me money,” he whined, shaking his hand under their noses. “Money! Money! Why don’t you give me any money? You haven’t got any? Liars! Filthy propertarians! Profiteers! Look at all that food, how did you get it if you haven’t any money?” He then offered himself for sale. “Bay me, bay me, for just a little money,” he wheedled.
“It isn’t bay, it’s buy” Rovab corrected him.
“Bay me, buy me, who cares, look, what a beautiful body, don’t you want it?” Tirin crooned, wagging his slender hips and batting his eyes. He was at last publicly executed with a fish knife and reappeared in normal clothing. There were skillful harp players and singers among them, and there was plenty of music and dancing, but more talk. They all talked as if they were to be struck dumb tomorrow.
As the night went on young lovers wandered off to copulate, seeking the single rooms; others got sleepy and went off to the dormitories; at last a small group was left amid the empty cups, the fishbones, and the pastry crumbs, which they would have to clean up before morning. But it was hours yet till morning. They talked. They nibbled on this and that as they talked. Bedap and Tirin and Shevek were there, a couple of other boys, three girls. They talked about the spatial representation of time as rhythm, and the connection of the ancient theories of the Numerical Harmonies with modern temporal physics. They talked about the best stroke for longdistance swimming. They talked about whether their childhoods had been happy. They talked about what happiness was.
“Suffering is a misunderstanding,” Shevek said, leaning forward, his eyes wide and light. He was still lanky, with big hands, protruding ears, and angular joints, but in the perfect health and strength of early manhood he was very beautiful. His dun-colored hair, like the others’, was fine and straight, worn at its full length and kept off the forehead with a band. Only one of them wore her hair differently, a girl with high cheekbones and a flat nose; she had cut her dark hair to a shiny cap all round. She was watching Shevek with a steady, serious gaze. Her lips were greasy from eating fried cakes, and there was a crumb on her chin.
“It exists,” Shevek said, spreading out his hands. “It’s real. I can call it a misunderstanding, but I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist, or will ever cease to exist. Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes, you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality. All of us here are going to know grief; if we live fifty years, we’ll have known pain for fifty years. And in the end we’ll die. That’s the condition we’re born on. I’m afraid of life! There are times I — I am very frightened. Any happiness seems trivial. And yet, I wonder if it isn’t all a misunderstanding — this grasping after happiness, this fear of pain… If instead of fearing it and running from it, one could… get through it, go beyond it. There is something beyond it. It’s the self that suffers, and there’s a place where the self — ceases. I don’t know how to say it. But I believe that the reality — the truth that I recognize in suffering as I don’t in comfort and happiness — that the reality of pain is not pain. If you can get through it. If you can endure it all the way.”
“The reality of our life is in love, in solidarity,” said a tall, soft-eyed girl. “Love is the true condition of human life.”