“Learn Iotic?”
“I said learn Iotic.”
“What for?”
“So you can read Urrasti physics! Atro, To, Baisk, those men. Nobody’s translated it into Pravic, nobody’s likely to. Six people, maybe, on Anarres are capable of understanding it. In any language.”
“How can I learn Iotic?”
“Grammar and a dictionary!”
Shevek stood his ground. “Where do I find them?”
“Here,” Sabul growled. He rummaged among the untidy shelves of small green-bound books. His movements were brusque and irritable. He located two thick, unbound volumes on a bottom shelf and slapped them down on the desk. “Tell me when you’re competent to read Atro in Iotic. Nothing I can do with you till then.”
“What kind of mathematics do these Urrasti use?”
“Nothing you can’t handle.”
“Is anybody working here in chronotopology?”
“Yes, Turet. You can consult him. You don’t need his lecture course.”
“I planned to attend Gvarab’s lectures.”
“What for?”
“Her work in frequency and cycle—”
Sabul sat down and got up again. He was unbearably restless, restless yet rigid, a woodrasp of a man. “Don’t waste time. You’re far beyond the old woman in Sequency theory, and the other ideas she spouts are trash.”
“I’m interested in Simultaneity principles.”
“Simultaneity! What kind of profiteering crap is Mitis feeding you up there?” The physicist glared, the veins on his temples bulging under the coarse, short hair.
“I organized a joint-work course in it myself.”
“Grow up. Grow up. Time to grow up. You’re here now. We’re working on physics here, not religion. Drop the mysticism and grow up. How soon can you learn Iotic?”
“It took me several years to learn Pravic,” Shevek said. His mild irony passed Sabul by completely.
“I did it in ten decads. Well enough to read To’s Introduction. Oh, hell, you need a text to work on. Might as well be that. Here. Wait.” He hunted through an overflowing drawer and finally achieved a book, a queer-looking book, bound in blue, without the Circle of Life on the cover. The title was stamped in gold letters and seemed to say Poilea Afio-ite, which didn’t make any sense, and the shapes of some of the letters were unfamiliar. Shevek stared at it, took it from Sabul, but did not open it. He was holding it, the thing he had wanted to see, the alien artifact, the message from another world.
He remembered the book Palat had shown him, the book of numbers.
“Come back when you can read that,” Sabul growled.
Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growclass="underline" “Keep those books with you! They’re not for general consumption.”
The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t let anybody else read them!”
Shevek made no response.
Sabul got up again and came close to him. “Listen. You’re now a member of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with me, Sabul. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?”
“I’m to acquire knowledge which I’m not to share,” Shevek said after a brief pause, stating the sentence as if it were a proposition in logic.
“If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street would you ‘share’ them with every kid that went by? Those books are explosives. Now do you follow me?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.
He set to work to learn Iotic. He worked alone in Room 46, because of Sabul’s warning, and because it came only too naturally to him to work alone.
Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way, different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek had not had it. His father had indeed been utterly reliable and affectionate. Whatever Shevek was and whatever he did, Palat approved and was loyal. But Palat had not had this curse of difference. He was like the others, like all the others to whom community came so easy. He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that recognition of each person’s solitude which alone transcends it.
Shevek was therefore used to an inward isolation, buffered by all the daily casual contacts and exchanges of communal life and by the companionship of a few friends. Here in Abbenay he had no friends, and because he was not thrown into the dormitory situation he made none. He was too conscious, at twenty, of the peculiarities of his mind and character to be outgoing; he was withdrawn and aloof; and his fellow students, sensing that the aloofness was real, did not often try to approach him.
The privacy of his room soon became dear to him. He savored his total independence. He left the room only for breakfast and dinner at the refectory and a quick daily hike through the city streets to appease his muscles, which had always been used to exercise; then back to Room 46 and the grammar of Iotic. Once every decad or two he was called on for “tenth-day” rotational community labor, but the people he worked with were strangers, not close acquaintances as they would have been in a small community, so that these days of manual work made no psychological interruption to his isolation, or to his progress in Iotic.
The grammar itself, being complex, illogical, and patterned, gave him pleasure. His learning went fast once he had built up the basic vocabulary, for he knew what he was reading; he knew the field and the terms, and whenever he got stuck either his own intuition or a mathematical equation would show him where he had got to. They were not always places he had been before. To’s Introduction to Temporal Physics was no beginner’s handbook. By the time he had worked his way to the middle of the book Shevek was no longer reading Iotic, he was reading physics; and he understood why Sabul had had him read the Urrasti physicists before he did anything else. They were far ahead of anything that had been done on Anarres for twenty or thirty years. The most brilliant insights of Sabul’s own works on Sequency were in fact translations from the Iotic, unacknowledged.
He plunged on through the other books Sabul doled out to him, the major works of contemporary Urrasti physics. His life grew even more hermitic. He was not active in the student syndicate, and did not attend the meetings of any other syndicates or federatives except the lethargic Physics Federation. The meetings of such groups, the vehicles of both social action and sociability, were the framework of life in any small community, but here in the city they seemed much less important. One was not necessary to them; there were always others ready to run things, and doing it well enough. Except for tenth-day duties and the usual janitorial assignments in his domicile and the laboratories, Shevek’s time was entirely his own. He often omitted exercise and occasionally meals. However, he never missed the one course he was attending, Gvarab’s lecture group on Frequency and Cycle.
Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears as her one constant auditor. She began to lecture for him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had the wits to be scared. Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared with her, he took, he shared. He was her brother, across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption.