Depot Street ended in a large airy place where five other streets rayed in to a triangular park of grass and trees. Most parks on Anarres were playgrounds of dirt or sand, with a stand of shrub and tree holums. This one was different. Shevek crossed the trafficless pavement and entered the park, drawn to it because he had seen it often in pictures, and because he wanted to see alien trees, Urrasti trees, from close up, to experience the greenness of those multitudinous leaves. The sun was setting, the sky was wide and clear, darkening to purple at the zenith, the dark of space showing through the thin atmosphere. He entered under the trees, alert, wary. Were they not wasteful, those crowding leaves? The tree holum got along very efficiently with spines and needles, and no excess of those. Wasn’t all this extravagant foliage mere excess, excrement? Such trees couldn’t thrive without a rich soil, constant watering, much care. He disapproved of their lavishness, their thriftlessness. He walked under them, among them. The alien grass was soft underfoot. It was like walking on living flesh. He shied back onto the path. The dark limbs of the trees reached out over his head, holding their many wide green hands above him. Awe came into him. He knew himself blessed though he had not asked for blessing.
Some way before him, down the darkening path, a person sat reading on a stone bench.
Shevek went forward slowly. He came to the bench and stood looking at the figure who sat with head bowed over the book in the green-gold dusk under the trees. It was a woman of fifty or sixty, strangely dressed, her hair pulled back in a knot. Her left hand on her chin nearly hid the stern mouth, her right held the papers on her knee. They were heavy, those papers; the cold hand on them was heavy. The light was dying fast but she never looked up. She went on reading the proof sheets of The Social Organism.
Shevek looked at Odo for a while, and then he sat down on the bench beside her.
He had no concept of status at all, and there was plenty of room on the bench. He was moved by a pure impulse of companionship.
He looked at the strong, sad profile, and at the hands, an old woman’s hands. He looked up into the shadowy branches. For the first time in his life he comprehended that Odo, whose face he had known since his infancy, whose ideas were central and abiding in his mind and the mind of everyone he knew, that Odo had never set foot on Anarres: that she had lived, and died, and was buried, in the shadow of green-leaved trees, in unimaginable cities, among people speaking unknown languages, on another world. Odo was an alien: an exile.
The young man sat beside the statue in the twilight, one almost as quiet as the other.
At last, realizing it was getting dark, he got up and made off into the streets again, asking directions to the Central Institute of the Sciences.
It was not far; he got there not long after the lights went on. A registrar or vigilkeeper was in the little office at the entrance, reading. He had to knock at the open door to get her attention. “Shevek,” he said. It was customary to start conversation with a stranger by offering your name as a kind of handle for him to take hold of. There were not many other handles to offer. There was no rank, no terms of rank, no conventional respectful forms of address.
“Kokvan,” the woman responded. “Weren’t you expecting to get in yesterday?”
They’ve changed the cargo-dirigible schedule. Is there an empty bed in one of the dorms?”
“Number 46 is empty. Across the courtyard, the building to the left There’s a note for you here from Sabul. He says call on him in the morning at the physics office.”
Thanks!” said Shevek, and strode off across the broad paved courtyard swinging his luggage — a winter coat and a spare pair of boots — in his hand. Lights were on in rooms all round the quadrangle. There was a murmur, a presence of people in the quietness. Something stirred, in the clear, keen air of the city night, a sense of drama, of promise.
Dinner hour was not over, and he made a quick detour by the Institute refectory to see if there was some spare food for a drop-in. He found that his name had already been put on the regular list, and he found the food excellent. There was even a dessert, stewed preserved fruit. Shevek loved sweets, and as he was one of the last diners and there was plenty of fruit left over, he took a second dish. He ate alone at a small table. At larger tables nearby groups of young people were talking over their empty plates; he overheard discussions on the behavior of argon at very low temperatures, the behavior of a chemistry teacher at a colloquium, the putative curvatures of time. A couple of people glanced at him; they did not come speak to him, as people in a small community would speak to a stranger; their glance was not unfriendly, perhaps a little challenging.
He found Room 46 in a long corridor of shut doors in the domicile. Evidently they were all singles, and he wondered why the registrar had sent him there. Since he was two years old he had always lived in dormitories, rooms of four to ten beds. He knocked at the door of 46. Silence. He opened the door. The.room was a small single, empty, dimly illuminated by the light in the corridor. He lighted the lamp. Two chairs, a desk, a well-used slide rule, a few books, and, folded neatly on the bed platform, a hand-woven orange blanket. Somebody else lived here, the registrar had made a mistake. He shut the door. He opened it again to turn off the lamp. On the desk under the lamp was a note, scribbled on a torn-off scrap of paper: “Shevek, Physics off. morning. 2-4-1-154. Sabul.”
He put his coat down on a chair, his boots on the floor. He stood awhile and read the titles of the books, standard references in physics and mathematics, green-bound, the Circle of Life stamped on the covers. He hung his coat in the closet and put his boots away. He drew the curtain of the closet carefully. He crossed the room to the door: four paces. He stood there hesitant a minute longer, and then, for the first time in his life, he closed the door of his own room.
Sabul was a small, stocky, slovenly man of forty. His facial hair was darker and coarser than common, and thickened to a regular beard on his chin. He wore a heavy winter overtunic, and from the look of it had worn it since last winter; the ends of the sleeves were black with grime. His manner was abrupt and grudging. He spoke in scraps, as he scribbled notes on scraps. He growled. “You’ve got to learn Iotic,” he growled at Shevek.