He spoke very earnestly. Pae assented with enthusiasm. “Exactly, sir! We are all in complete agreement with your aims!”
Oiie looked at him from those black, opaque, oval eyes, and said, “Then you come, essentially, as an emissary of your society?”
Shevek returned to sit on the marble seat by the hearth, which he already felt as his seat, his territory. He wanted a territory. He felt the need for caution. But he felt more strongly the need that had brought him across the dry abyss from the other world, the need for communication, the wish to unbuild walls.
“I come,” he said carefully, “as a syndic of the Syndicate of Initiative, the group that talks with Urras on the radio these last two years. But I am not, you know, an ambassador from any authority, any institution. I hope you did not ask me as that.”
“No,” Oiie said. “We asked you — Shevek the physicist With the approval of our government and the Council of World Governments, of course. But you are here as the private guest of Ieu Eun University.”
“Good.”
“But we haven’t been sure whether or not you came with the approval of—” He hesitated.
Shevek grinned. “Of my government?”
“We know that nominally there’s no government on Anarres. However, obviously there’s administration. And we gather that the group that sent you, your Syndicate, is a kind of faction; perhaps a revolutionary faction.”
“Everybody on Anarres is a revolutionary, Oiie… The network of administration and management is called PDC, Production and Distribution Coordination. They are a coordinating system for all syndicates, federatives, and individuals who do productive work. They do not govern persons; they administer production. They have no authority either to support me or to prevent me. They can only tell us the public opinion of us — where we stand in the social conscience. That’s what you want to know? Well, my friends and I are mostly disapproved of. Most people on Anarres don’t want to learn about Urras. They fear it and want nothing to do with the propertarians. I am sorry if I am rude! It is the same here, with some people, is it not? The contempt, the fear, the tribalism. Well, so I came to begin to change that.”
“Entirely on your own initiative,” said Oiie.
“It is the only initiative I acknowledge,” Shevek said, smiling, in dead earnest.
He spent the next couple of days talking with the scientists who came to see him, reading the books Pae brought him, and sometimes simply standing at the double-arched windows to gaze at the coming of summer to the great valley, and to listen for the brief, sweet conversations out there in the open air. Birds: he knew the singers’ name now, and what they looked like from pictures in the books, but still when he heard the song or caught the flash of wings from tree to tree, he stood in wonder like a child.
He had expected to feel so strange, here on Urras, so lost, alien, and confused — and he felt nothing of the kind. Or course there were endless things he did not understand. He only glimpsed, now, how many things: this whole incredibly complex society with all its nations, classes, castes, cults, customs, and its magnificent, appalling, and interminable history. And each individual he met was a puzzle, full of surprises. But they were not the gross, cold egoists he had expected them to be: they were as complex and various as their culture, as their landscape; and they were intelligent; and they were kind. They treated him like a brother, they did all they could to make him feel not lost, not alien, but at home. And he did feel at home. He could not help it. The whole world, the softness of the air, the fall of sunlight across the hills, the very pull of the heavier gravity on his body, asserted to him that this was home indeed, his race’s world; and all its beauty was his birthright.
The silence, the utter silence of Anarres: he thought of it at night. No birds sang there. There were no voices there but human voices. Silence, and the barren lands.
On the third day old Atro brought him a pile of newspapers. Pae, who was Shevek’s very frequent companion, said nothing to Atro, but when the old man left he told Shevek, “Awful trash, those papers, sir. Amusing, but don’t believe anything you read in them.”
Shevek took up the topmost paper. It was badly printed on coarse paper — the first crudely made artifact he had handled on Urras. In fact it looked like the PDC bulletins and regional reports that served as newspapers on Anarres, but its style was very different from those smudgy, practical, factual publications. It was full of exclamation points and pictures. There was a picture of Shevek in front of the spaceship, with Pae holding his arm and scowling. FIRST MAN FROM THE MOON! said the huge print over the picture. Fascinated, Shevek read on.
His first step on Earth! Urras’ first visitor from the Anarres Settlement in 170 years, Dr. Shevek, was photographed yesterday at his arrival on the regular Moon freighter run at Peier Space Port. The distinguished scientist, winner of the Seo Oen Prize for service to all nations through science, has accepted a professorship at Ieu Eun University, an honor never before accorded to an off-worlder. Asked about his feelings on first viewing Urras, the tall, distinguished physicist replied, “It is a great honor to be invited to your beautiful planet. I hope that a new era of all-Cetian friendship is now beginning, when the Twin Planets will move forward together in brotherhood.”
“But I never said anything!” Shevek protested to Pae.
“Of course not. We didn’t let that lot get near you. That doesn’t cramp a birdseed journalist’s imagination! They’ll report you as saying what they want you to say, no matter what you do say, or don’t.”
Shevek chewed his lip. “Well,” he said at last, “if I had said anything, it would have been like that. But what is, ‘all-Cetian’?”
“The Terrans call us ‘Cetians.’ From their word for our sun, I believe. The popular press has picked it up lately, there’s a sort of fad for the word.”
“Then ‘all-Cetian’ means Urras and Anarres together?”
“I suppose so,” Pae said with marked lack of interest.
Shevek went on reading the papers. He read that he was a towering giant of a man, that he was unshaven and possessed a ‘mane,’ whatever that was, of greying hair, that he was thirty-seven, forty-three-and fifty-six; that ho had written a great work of physics called (the spelling depended on the paper) Principals of Simultaneity or Principles of Simiultany, that he was a goodwill ambassador from the Odonian government, that he was a vegetarian, and that, like all Anarresti, he did not drink. At this he. broke down and laughed till his ribs hurt. “By damn, they do have imagination! Do they think we live on water vapor, like the rockmoss?”
“They mean you don’t drink alcoholic liquors,” said Pae, also laughing. “The one thing everybody knows about Odonians, I suppose, is that you don’t drink alcohol. Is it true, by the way?”
“Some people distill alcohol from fermented holum root, for drinking. They say it gives the unconscious free play, like brainwave training. Most people prefer that, it’s very easy and doesn’t cause a disease. Is that common here?”
“Drinking is. I don’t know about this disease. What’s it called?”
“Alcoholism, I think.”
“Oh, I see… But what do working people do on Anarres for a bit of jollity, to escape the woes of the world together for a night?”
Shevek looked blank. “Well, we… I don’t know. Perhaps our woes are inescapable?”
“Quaint,” Pae said, and smiled disarmingly,
Shevek pursued his reading. One of the journals was in a language he did not know, and one in a different alphabet altogether. The one was from Thu, Pae explained, and the other from Benbili, a nation in the western hemisphere. The paper from Thu was well printed and sober in format; Pae explained that it was a government publication. “Here in A-Io, you see, educated people get their news from the telefax, and radio and television, and the weekly reviews. These papers are read by the lower classes almost exclusively — written by semiliterates for semiliterates, as you can see. We have complete freedom of the press in A-Io, which inevitably means we get a lot of trash. The Thuvian paper is much better written but it reports only those facts which the Thuvian Central Presidium wants reported. Censorship is absolute, in Thu. The state is all, and all for the state. Hardly the place for an Odonian, eh, sir?”