“What kind of help are you looking for?”
Shevek made an effort to pull himself together. He looked around the little, Uttered office, and at Maedda. “I have something they want,” he said. “An idea. A scientific theory. I came here from Anarres because I thought that here I could do the work and publish it. I didn’t understand that here an idea is a property of the State. I don’t work for a State. I cant take the money and the things they give me. I want to get out But I can’t go home. So I came here. You don’t want my science, and maybe you don’t like your government either.”
Maedda smiled. “No. I don’t. But our government don’t like me any better. You didn’t pick the safest place to come, either for you or for us… Don’t worry. Tonight’s tonight; we’ll decide what to do.”
Shevek took out the note he had found in his coat pocket and handed it to Maedda. “This is what brought me. Is it from people you know?”
“Join with us your brothers… I don’t know. Could be.”
“Are you Odonians?”
“Partly. Syndicalists, libertarians. We work with the Thuvianists, the Socialist Workers Union, but we’re anti-centralist. You arrived at a pretty hot moment, you know.”
“The war?”
Maedda nodded. “A demonstration’s been announced for three days from now. against the draft, war taxes, the rise in food prices. There’s four hundred thousand unemployed in Nio Esseia, and they jack up taxes and prices.” He had been watching Shevek steadily all the time they talked; now, as if the examination was done, he looked away, leaning back in his chair. “This city’s about ready for anything. A strike is what we need, a general strike, and massive demonstrations. Like the Ninth Month Strike that Odo led,” he added with a dry, strained smile. “We could use an Odo now. But they’ve got no Moon to buy us off with this time. We make justice here, or nowhere.” He looked back at Shevek, and presently said in a softer voice, “Do you know what your society has meant, here, to us, these last hundred and fifty years? Do you know that when people here want to wish each other luck they say, ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’ To know that it exists, to know that there is a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation, that they can never say again that it’s just a mirage, an idealist’s dream! I wonder if you fully understand why theyVe kept you so well hidden out there at Ieu Eun, Dr. Shevek. Why you never were allowed to appear at any meeting open to the public. Why they’ll be after you like dogs after a rabbit the moment they find you’re gone. It’s not just because they want this idea of yours. But because you are an idea. A dangerous one. The idea of anarchism, made flesh, Walking amongst us.”
“Then you’ve got your Odo,” the girl said in her quiet, urgent voice. She had re-entered as Maedda was speaking. “After all, Odo was only an idea. Dr. Shevek is the proof.”
Maedda was silent for a minute. “An undemonstrable proof,” he said.
“Why?”
“If people know he’s here, the police will know it too.”
“Let them come and try to take him,” the girl said, and smiled.
“The demonstration is going to be absolutely nonviolent,” Maedda said with sudden violence. “Even the SWU have accepted that!”
“I haven’t accepted it, Tuio. I’m not going to let my face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the black-coats. If they hurt me, 111 hurt back.”
“Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not achieved by force!”
“And power isn’t achieved by passivity.”
“We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! What do you say?” Maedda appealed to Shevek. “The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!”
Shevek looked at him, at the girl, and at the pawnbroker who stood listening tensely near the door. He said in a tired, quiet voice, “If I would be of use, use me. Maybe I could publish a statement on this in one of your papers. I did not come to Urtas to hide. If all the people know I am here, maybe the government would be afraid to arrest me in public? I don’t know.”
“That’s it,” Maedda said. “Of course.” His dark eyes blazed with excitement. “Where the devil is Remeivi? Go call his sister, Siro, tell her to hunt him out and get him over here. — Write why you came here, write about Anar-res, write why you won’t sell yourself to the government, write what you like — we’ll get it printed. Siro! Call Meisthe too, — We’ll hide you, but fay God well let ever man in A-Io know you’re here, you’re with us!” The words poured out of him, his hands jerked as he spoke, and he walked quickly back and forth across the room, “And then, after the demonstration, after the strike, we’ll see. Maybe things will be different then! Maybe you won’t have to hide!”
“Maybe all the prison doors will fly open,” Shevek said. “Well, give me some paper, I’ll write.”
The girl Siro came up to him. Smiling, she stooped as if bowing to him, a little timorously, with decorum, and kissed him on the cheek; then she went out. The touch of her lips was cool, and he felt it on his cheek for a long time.
He spent one day in the attic of a tenement in Joking Lane, and two nights and a day in a basement under a used-furniture store, a strange dim place full of empty mirror frames and broken bedsteads. He wrote. They brought him what he had written, printed, within a few hours; at first in the newspaper Modern Age, and later, after the Modern Age presses had been closed down and the editors arrested, as handbills run on a clandestine press, along with plans and incitations for the demonstration and general strike. He did not read over what he had written. He did not listen closely to Maedda and the others, who described the enthusiasm with which the papers were read, the spreading acceptance of the plan for the strike, the effect his presence at the demonstration would make in the eyes of the world. When they left him alone, sometimes he took a small notebook from his shirt pocket and looked at the coded notes and equations of the General Temporal Theory. He looked at them and could not read them. He did not understand them. He put the notebook away again and sat with his head between his hands.
Anarres had no flag to wave, but among the placards proclaiming the general strike, and the blue and white banners of the Syndicalists and the Socialist Workers, there were many homemade signs showing the green Circle of Life, the old symbol of the Odonian Movement of two hundred years before. All the flags and signs shone bravely in the sunlight.
It was good to be outside, after the rooms with locked doors, the hiding places. It was good to be walking, swinging his arms, breathing the clear air of a spring morning. To be among so many people, so immense a crowd, thousands marching together, filling all the side streets as well as the broad thoroughfare down which they marched, was frightening, but it was exhilarating too. When they sang, both the exhilaration and the fear became a blind exaltation; he eyes filled with tears. It was deep, in the deep streets, softened by open air and by distances, indistinct, overwhelming, that lifting up of thousands of voices in one song. The singing of the front of the march, far away up the street, and of the endless crowds coming on behind, was put out of phase by the distance the sound must travel, so that the melody seemed always to be lagging and catching up with itself, like a canon, and all the parts of the song were being sung at one time, in the same moment, though each singer sang the tune as a line from beginning to end.
He did not know their songs, and only listened and was borne along on the music, until from up front there came sweeping back wave by wave down the great slow-moving river of people a tune he knew. He lifted his head and sang it with them, in his own language as he had learned it: the Hymn of the Insurrection. It had been sung in these streets, in this same street, two hundred years ago, by these people, his people.