Atro could trace his genealogy back for eleven hundred years, through generals, princes, great landowners. The family still owned an estate of seven thousand acres and fourteen villages in Sie Province, the most rural region of A-Io. He had provincial turns of speech, archaisms to which he clung with pride. Wealth impressed him not at all, and he referred to the entire government of his country as “demagogues and crawling politicians.” His respect was not to be bought. Yet he gave it, freely, to any fool with what he called “the right name.” In some ways he was totally incomprehensible to Shevek — an enigma: the aristocrat. And yet his genuine contempt for both money and power made Shevek feel closer to him than to anyone else he had met on Urras.
Once, as they sat together on the glassed-in porch where he raised all kinds of rare and out-of-season flowers, he chanced to use the phrase, “we Cetians.” Shevek caught him up on it: “’Cetians’ — isn’t that a birdseed word?”
“Birdseed” was slang for the popular press, the newspapers, broadcasts, and fiction manufactured for the urban working people.
“Birdseed!” Atro repeated. “My dear fellow, where the devil do you pick up these vulgarisms? I mean by ‘Cetians’ precisely what the daily-paper writers and their lip-moving readers understand by the term. Urras and Anarres!”
“I was surprised that you used a foreign word — a non-Cetian word, in fact.”
“Definition by exclusion,” the old man parried gleefully. “A hundred years ago we didn’t need the word. ‘Mankind’ would do. But sixty-some years ago that changed. I was seventeen, it was a nice sunny day in early summer, I remember it quite vividly. I was exercising my horse, and my elder sister called out the window, They’re talking to somebody from Outer Space on the radio!’ My poor dear mother thought we were all doomed; foreign devils, you know. But it was only the Hainish, quacking about peace and brotherhood. Well, nowadays ‘mankind’ is a bit over-inclusive. What defines brotherhood but nonbrotherhood? Definition by exclusion, my dear! You and I are kinsmen. Your people were probably herding goats in the mountains while mine were oppressing serfs in Sie, a few centuries ago; but we’re members of the same family. To know it, one only has to meet — to hear of — an alien, A being from another solar system. A man, so-called, who has nothing in common with us except the practical arrangement of two legs, two arms, and a head with some kind of brain in it!”
“But haven’t the Hainish proved that we are—”
“All of alien origin, offspring of Hainish interstellar colonists, half a million years ago, or a million, or two or three million, yes, I know. Proved! By the Primal Number, Shevek, you sound like a first-year seminarian! How can you speak seriously of historical proof, over such a span of time? Those Hainish toss millennia about like handballs, but it’s all juggling. Proof, indeed! The religion of my fathers informs me, with equal authority, that I’m a descendant of Pinra Od, whom God exiled from the Garden because he had the audacity to count his fingers and toes, add them up to twenty, and thus let Time loose upon the universe. I prefer that story to the aliens’, if I must choose!”
Shevek laughed; Atro’s humors gave him pleasure. But the old man was serious. He tapped Shevek on the arm, and, twitching his eyebrows and munching with his lips as he did when he was moved, said, “I hope you feel the same, my dear. I earnestly hope it. There’s a great deal that’s admirable, I’m sure, in your society, but it doesn’t teach you to discriminate — which is after all the best thing civilization teaches. I don’t want those damned aliens getting at you through your notions about brotherhood and mutualism and all that. They’ll spout you whole rivers of ‘common humanity’ and ‘leagues of all the worlds’ and so on, and I’d hate to see you swallow it. The law of existence is struggle — competition — elimination of the weak — a ruthless war for survival. And I want to see the best survive. The kind of humanity I know. The Cetians. You and I: Urras and Anarres. We’re ahead of them now, all those Hainish and Terrans and whatever else they call themselves, and we’ve got to stay ahead of them. They brought us the interstellar drive, but we’re making better interstellar ships now than they are. When you come to release your theory, I earnestly hope you’ll think of your duty to your own people, your own kind. Of what loyalty means, and to whom it’s due.” The easy tears of old age had sprung into Atro’s half-blind eyes. Shevek put his hand on the old man’s arm, reassuring, but he said nothing.
“They’ll get it, of course. Eventually. And they ought to. Scientific truth will out, you can’t hide the sun under a stone. But before they get it, I want them to pay for it! I want us to take our rightful place. I want respect: and that’s what you can win us. Transilience — if we’ve mastered transilience, their interstellar drive won’t amount to a hill of beans. It’s not money I want, you know. I want the superiority of Cetian science recognized, the superiority of the Cetian mind. If there has to be an interstellar civilization, then by God I don’t want my people to be low-caste members of it! We should come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands — that’s how it should be. Well, well, I get hot about it sometimes. By the way, how’s it going, your book?”
“I’ve been working on Skask’s gravitational hypothesis. I have a feeling he’s wrong in using partial differential equations only.”
“But your last paper was on gravity. When are you going to get to the real thing?”
“You know that the means are the end, to us Odonians,” Shevek said lightly. “Besides, I can’t very well present a theory of time that omits gravity, can I?”
“You mean you’re giving it to us in bits and dribbles?” Atro asked, suspiciously. “That hadn’t occurred to me. I’d better look over that last paper. Some of it didn’t make much sense to me. My eyes get so tired these days. I think that damnable magnifier-projector-thingy I have to use for reading has something wrong with it. It doesn’t seem to project the words clearly any more.”
Shevek looked at the old man with compunction and affection, but he did not tell him any more about the state of his theory.
Invitations to receptions, dedications, openings, and so forth were delivered to Shevek daily. He went to some, because be had come to Urras on a mission and must try to fulfill it: he must urge the idea of brotherhood, he must represent, in his own person, the solidarity of the Two Worlds. He spoke, and people listened to him and said, “How true.”
He wondered why the government did not stop him from speaking. Chifoilisk must have exaggerated, for his own purposes, the extent of the control and censorship they could exert. He talked pure anarchism, and they did not stop him. But did they need to stop him? It seemed that he talked to the same people every time: well dressed, well fed, well mannered, smiling. Were they the only kind of people on Urras? “It is pain that brings men together,” Shevek said standing up before them, and they nodded and said, “How true.”
He began to hate them and, realizing that, abruptly ceased accepting their invitations.
But to do so was to accept failure and to increase his isolation. He wasn’t doing what he had come here to do. It was not that they cut him off, he told himself; it was that — as always — he had cut himself off from them. He was lonely, stiflingly lonely, among all the people he saw every day. The trouble was that he was not in touch. He felt that he had not touched anything, anyone, on Urras in all these months.