“Will you be blamed for this, Efor?”
They were both whispering.
“I don’t know you gone. Morning, I say you don’t get up yet. Sleeping. Keep ’em off a while.”
Shevek took him by the shoulders, embraced him, shook his hand. “Thank you, Efor!”
“Good luck,” the man said, bewildered. Shevek was already gone.
Shevek’s costly day with Vea had taken most of his ready cash, and the taxi ride in to Nio took ten units more. He got out at a major subway station and by using his map worked his way by subway into Old Town, a section of the city he had never seen. Joking Lane was not on the map, so he got off the train at the central stop for Old Town. When he came up from the spacious marble station into the street he stopped in confusion. This did not look like Nio Esseia.
A fine, foggy rain was falling, and it was quite dark; there were no street lights. The lampposts were there, but the lights were not turned on, or were broken. Yellow gleams slitted from around shuttered windows here and there. Down the street, light streamed from an open doorway, around which a group of men were lounging, talking loud. The pavement, greasy with rain, was littered with scraps of paper and refuse. The shopfronts, as well as he could make them out, were low, and were all covered up with heavy metal or wooden shutters, except for one which had been gutted by fire and stood black and blank, shards of glass still sticking in the frames of the broken windows. People went by, silent hasty shadows.
An old woman was coming up the stairs behind him, and he turned to her to ask his way. In the light of the yellow globe that marked the subway entrance he saw her face clearly: white and lined, with the dead, hostile stare of weariness. Big glass earrings bobbed on her cheeks. She climbed the stairs laboriously, hunched over with fatigue or with arthritis or some deformity of the spine. But she was not old, as he had thought; she was not even thirty.
“Can you tell me where Joking Lane is,” he asked her, stammering. She glanced at him with indifference, hurried her pace as she reached the top of the stairs, and went on without a word.
He set off at random down the street The excitement of his sudden decision and flight from Ieu Eun had turned to apprehension, a sense of being driven, hunted. He avoided the group of men around the door, instinct warning him that the single stranger does not approach that kind of group. When he saw a man ahead of him walking alone, he caught up and repeated his question. The man said, MI don’t know,” and turned aside,
There was nothing to do but go on. He came to a better-lighted cross street, which wound off into the misty rain in both directions in a dim, grim garishness of lighted signs and advertisements. There were many wineshops and pawnshops, some of them still open. A good many people were in the street, jostling past, going in and out of the wineshops. There was a man lying down, lying in the gutter, his coat bunched up over his head, lying in the rain, asleep, sick, dead. Shevek stared at him with horror, and at the others who walked past without looking.
As he stood there paralyzed, somebody stopped by him and looked up into his face, a short, unshaven, wry-necked fellow of fifty or sixty, with red-rimmed eyes and a toothless mouth opened in a laugh. He stood and laughed wit-lessly at the big, terrified man, pointing a shaky hand at him. “Where you get all that hair, eh, eh, that hair, where you get all that hair,” he mumbled.
“Can — can you tell me how to get to Joking Lane?”
“Sure, joking, I’m joking, no joke I’m broke. Hey you got a little blue for a drink on a cold night? Sure you got a little blue.”
He came closer. Shevek drew away, seeing the open hand but not understanding.
“Come on, take a joke mister, one little blue,” the man mumbled without threat or pleading, mechanically, his mouth still open in the meaningless grin, his hand held out.
Shevek understood. He groped in his pocket, found the last of his money, thrust it into the beggar’s hand, and then, cold with a fear that was not fear for himself, pushed past the man, who was mumbling and trying to catch at his coat, and made for the nearest open door. It was under a sign that read “Pawn and Used Goods Best Values.” In-iside, among the racks of worn-out coats, shoes, shawls, battered instruments, broken lamps, odd dishes, canisters, spoons, beads, wrecks and fragments, every piece of rubbish marked with its price, he stood trying to collect himself.
“Looking for something?”
He put his question once more.
The shopkeeper, a dark man as tall as Shevek but stooped and very thin, looked him over. “What you want to get there for?”
“I’m looking for a person who lives there.”
“Where you from?”
“I need to get to this street, Joking Lane. Is it far from here?”
“Where you from, mister?”
“I am from Anarres, from the Moon,” Shevek said angrily. “I have to get to Joking Lane, now, tonight”
“You’re him? The scientist fellow? What the hell you doing here?”
“Getting away from the police! Do you want to tell them I’m here, or will you help me?”
“God damn,” the man said. “God damn. Look—” He hesitated, was about to say something, about to say something else, said, “You just go on,” and in the same breath though apparently with a complete change of mind, said, “All right I’m closing. Take you there. Hold on. God damn!”
He rummaged in the back of the shop, switched off the light, came outside with Shevek, pulled down metal shutters and locked them, padlocked the door, and set off at a sharp pace, saying, “Come oaf.”
They walked twenty or thirty blocks, getting deeper into the maze of crooked streets and alleys in the heart of Old Town. The misty rain fell softly in the unevenly lit darkness, bringing out smells of decay, of wet stone and metal. They turned down an unlit, unsigned alley between high old tenements, the ground floors of which were mostly shops. Shevek’s guide stopped and knocked on the shuttered window of one: V. Maedda, Fancy Groceries. After a good while the door was opened. The pawnbroker conferred with a person inside, then gestured to Shevek, and they both entered. A girl had let them in. “Tuio’s in back, come on,19 she said, looking up into Shevek’s face in the weak light from a back hallway. “Are you him?” Her voice was faint and urgent; she smiled strangely. “Are you really him?”
Tuio Maedda was a dark man in his forties, with a strained, intellectual face. He shut a book in which be had been writing and got quickly to his feet as they entered. He greeted the pawnbroker by name, but never took his eyes off Shevek.
“He come to my shop asking the way here, Tuio. He say be the, you know, the one from Anarres.”
“You are, aren’t you?” Maedda said slowly. “Shevek, What are you doing here?” He stared at Shevek with alarmed, luminous eyes.
“Looking for help.”
“Who sent you to me?”
“The first man I asked. I don’t know who you are. I asked him where I could go, he said to come to you.”
“Does anybody else know you’re here?”
They don’t know I’ve gone. Tomorrow they will.”
“Go get Remeivi,” Maedda said to the girl. “Sit down, Dr. Shevek. You’d better tell me what’s going on.”
Shevek sat down on a wooden chair but did not unfasten his coat. He was so tired he was shaking. “I escaped,” he said. “From the University, from the jail. I don’t know where to go. Maybe it’s all jails here. I came here because they talk about the lower classes, the working classes, and I thought, that sounds like my people. People who might help each other.”