“Oh, by damn, Bunub, if Takver hadn’t wanted the posting she’d have refused it. You know we’re facing a famine.”
“Well. I wondered if she hadn’t been looking for a. move. It often happens after a baby comes. I thought long ago you should have given that baby to a nursery. The amount it cried. Children come between partners. Tie them down. It’s only natural, as you say, that she should have been looking for a change, and jumped at it when she got it.”
“I did not say that. I’m going to breakfast.” He strode out, quivering at five or six sensitive spots which Bunub had accurately wounded. The horror of the woman was that she voiced all his own most despicable fears. She now stayed behind in the room, probably to plan her move into it.
He had overslept, and got to commons just before they closed the doors. Ravenous still from the journey, he took a double helping of both porridge and bread. The boy behind the serving tables looked at him frowning. These days nobody took double helpings. Shevek stared frown-Ing back and said nothing. He had gone eighty-odd hours now on two bowls of soup and one kilo of bread, and he had a right to make up for what he had missed, but he was damned if he would explain. Existence is its own justification, need is right. He was an Odonian, he left guilt to profiteers.
He sat down by himself, but Desar joined him immediately, smiling, staring at or beside him with disconcerting wall eyes. “Been gone while,” Desar said.
“Farm draft. Six decads. How have things been here?”
“Lean.”
“They’ll get leaner,” Shevek said, but without real conviction, for he was eating, and the porridge tasted exceedingly good. Frustration, anxiety, famine! said his forebrain, seat of intellect; but his hindbrain, squatting in unrepentant savagery back in the deep skull’s darkness, said Food now! Food now! Good, good!
“Seen Sabul?”
“No. I got in late last night.” He glanced up at Desar and said with attempted indifference, “Takver got a famine posting; she had to leave four days ago.”
Desar nodded with genuine indifference. “Heard that. You hear about Institute reorganizing?”
“No. What’s up?”
The mathematician spread out his long, slender hands on the table and looked down at them. He was always tongue-tied and telegraphic; in fact, he stammered; but whether it was a verbal or a moral stammer Shevek had never decided. As he had always liked Desar without knowing why, so there were moments when he disliked Desar intensely, again without knowing why. This was one of the moments. There was a slyness in the expression of Desar’s mouth, his downcast eyes, like Bunub’s downcast eyes.
“Shakedown. Cutting back to functional staff. Shipeg’s out.” Shipeg was a notoriously stupid mathematician who had always managed, by assiduous flattery of students, to get himself one student-requisitioned course each term, “Sent him off. Some regional institute.”
“He’d do less harm hoeing ground-holum,” Shevek said. Now that he was fed, it appeared to him that the drought might after all be of service to the social organism. The priorities were becoming clear again. Weaknesses, soft spots, sick spots would be scoured out, sluggish organs restored to full function, the fat would be trimmed off the body politic.
“Put in word for you, Institute meeting,” Desar said, looking up but not meeting, because he could not meet, Shevek’s eyes. As he spoke, though Shevek did not yet understand what he meant, he knew that Desar was lying. He knew it positively. Desar had not put in a word for him, but a word against him.
The reason for his moments of detesting Desar was clear to him now: a recognition, heretofore unadmitted, of the element of pure malice in Desar’s personality. That Desar also loved him and was trying to gam power over him was equally clear, and, to Shevek, equally detestable. The devious ways of possessiveness, the labyrinths of love/hate, were meaningless to him. Arrogant, intolerant, he walked right through their walls. He did not speak again to the mathematician, but finished his breakfast and went off across the quadrangle, through the bright morning of early autumn, to the physics office.
He went to the back room which everybody called “Sabul’s office,” the room where they had first met, where Sabul had given him the grammar and dictionary of Iotic. Sabul looked up warily across the desk, looked down again, busy with papers, the hardworking, abstracted scientist; then allowed awareness of Shevek’s presence to seep into his overloaded brain; then became, for him, effusive. He looked thin and aged, and when he got up he stooped more than be had used to do, a placating kind of stoop. “Bad times,” he said. “Eh? Bad times!”
“They’ll get worse,” Shevek said lightly. “How’s everything here?”
“Bad, bad.” Sabul shook his grizzled head. “This is a bad time for pure science, for the intellectual.”
“Is there ever a good one?”
Sabul produced an unnatural chuckle.
“Did anything come in for us on the summer shipments from Urras?” Shevek inquired, clearing off sitting room on the bench. He sat down and crossed his legs. His light skin had tanned and the fine down that covered his face had bleached to silver while he worked in the fields in South-rising. He looked spare, and sound, and young, compared to Sabul. Both men were aware of the contrast.
“Nothing of interest.”
“No reviews of the Principles?”
“No.” Sabul’s tone was surly, more like himself.
“No letters?”
“No.”
“That’s odd.”
“What’s odd about it? What did you expect, a lectureship at Ieu Eun University? The Seo Oen Prize?”
“I expected reviews and replies. There’s been time.” He said this as Sabul said, “Hardly been time for reviews yet”
There was a pause.
“You’ll have to realize, Shevek, that a mere conviction of Tightness isn’t self-justifying. You worked hard on the book, I know. I worked hard editing it, too, trying to make clear that it wasn’t just an irresponsible attack on Sequency theory, but had positive aspects. But if other physicists don’t see value in your work, then you’ve got to begin looking at the values you hold and seeing where the discrepancy lies. If it means nothing to other people, what’s the good of it? What’s its function?”
“I’m a physicist, not a functions analyst,” Shevek said amiably.
“Every Odonian has to be a functions analyst You’re thirty, aren’t you? By that age a man should know not only his cellular function but his organic function — what his optimum role in the social organism is. You haven’t had to think about that, perhaps, as much as most people-”
“No. Since I was ten or twelve I’ve known what kind of work I had to do.”
“What a boy thinks he likes to do isn’t always what his society needs from him.”
“I’m thirty, as you say. Rather an old boy.”
“You’ve reached that age in an unusually sheltered, protected environment First the Northsetting Regional Institute—”
“And a forest project, and farm projects, and practical training, and block committees, and volunteer work since the drought; the usual amount of necessary kleggich. I like doing it, in fact But I do physics too. What are you getting at?”
As Sabul did not answer but merely glared under his heavy, oily brows, Shevek added, “You might as well say it plainly, because you’re not going to arrive at it by way of my social conscience.”
“Do you consider the work you’ve done here functional?”
“Yes. The more that is organized, the more central the organism: centrality here implying the field of real function.’ Tomar’s Definitions, Since temporal physics attempts to organize everything comprehensible to the human mind, it is by definition a centrally functional activity.”