Late in the long afternoon the man woke up, and after staring out at the desert a while he asked, “You always do this run alone?”
“Last three, four years.”
“Ever break down out here?”
“Couple of times. Plenty of rations and water in the locker. You hungry, by the way?”
“Not yet”
“They send down the breakdown rig from Lonesome within a day or so.”
“That’s the next settlement?”
“Right Seventeen hundred kilometers from Sedep Mines to Lonesome. Longest run between towns on Anarres. I’ve been doing it for eleven years.”
“Not tired of it?”
“No. Like to run a job by myself.”
The passenger nodded agreement.
“And it’s steady. I like routine; you can think. Fifteen days on the run, fifteen off with the partner in New Hope. Year in, year out; drought, famine, whatever. Nothing changes, it’s always drought down here. I like the run. Get the water out, will you? Cooler’s back underneath the locker.”
They each had a long swig from the bottle. The water had a flat, alkaline taste, but was cool. “Ah, that’s good!” the passenger said gratefully. He put the bottle away and, returning to his seat in the front of the cab, stretched, bracing his hands against the roof. “You’re a partnered man, then,” he said. There was a simplicity in the way he said it that the driver liked, and he answered, “Eighteen years.”
“Just starting.”
“By damn, I agree with that! Now that’s what some don’t see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around enough in your teens, that’s when you get the most out of it, and also you find out that it’s all pretty much the same damn thing. And a good thing, too! But still, what’s different isn’t the copulating; it’s the other person. And eighteen years is just a start, all right, when it comes to figuring out that difference. At least, if it’s a woman you’re trying to figure out A woman won’t let on to being so puzzled by a man, but maybe they bluff… Anyhow, that’s the pleasure of it The puzzles and the bluffs and the rest of it. The variety. Variety doesn’t come with just moving around. I was all over Anarrea, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I came back here, and I do this run every three decads year in year out through this same desert where you cant tell one sandhill from the next and it’s all the same for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and go home to the same partner — and I never been bored once. It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.”
“That’s it,” said the passenger.
“Where’s the partner?”
“In Northeast. Four years now.”
“That’s too long,” the driver said. “You should have been posted together.”
“Not where I was.”
“Where’s that?”
“Elbow, and then Grand Valley.”
“I heard about Grand Valley.” He now looked at the passenger with the respect due a survivor. He saw the dry look of the man’s tanned skin, a kind of weathering to the bone, which he had seen in others who had come through the famine years in the Dust “We shouldn’t have tried to keep those mills running!”
“We needed the phosphates.”
“But they say, when the provisions train was stopped in Portal, they kept the mills going, and people died of hunger on the job. Just went a little out of the way and lay down and died. Was it like that?”
The man nodded. He said nothing. The driver pressed no further, but said after a while, “I wondered what I’d do if my train ever got mobbed.”
“It never did?”
“No. See, I don’t carry foodstuffs; one truckload, at most, for Upper Sedep. This is an ores run. But if I got on a provisions run, and they stopped me, what would I do? Run ’em down and get the food to where it ought to go? But hell, you going to run down kids, old men? They’re doing wrong but you going to kill em for it? I don’t knowl”
The straight shining rails ran under the wheels. Clouds in the west laid great shivering mirages on the plain, the shadows of dreams of lakes gone dry ten million years ago.
“A syndic, fellow I’ve known for years, he did just that, north of here, in ’66. They tried to take a grain truck off his train. He backed the train, killed a couple of them before they cleared the track, they were like worms in rotten fish, thick, he said. He said, there’s eight hundred people waiting for that grain truck, and how many of them might die if they don’t get it? More than a couple, a lot more. So it looks like he was right. But by damn! I can’t add up figures like that. I don’t know if it’s right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?”
The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations — just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them, I earned them by making lists of who should starve,” The man’s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. “Like you said, I was to count people.”
“You quit?”
“Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There’s always somebody willing to make lists.”
“Now that’s wrong,” the driver said, scowling into the glare. He had a bald brown face and scalp, no hair left between cheeks and occiput, though he wasn’t past his middle forties. It was a strong, hard, and innocent face. “That’s dead wrong. They should have shut the mills down. You can’t ask a man to do that. Aren’t we Odonians? A man can lose his temper, all right. That’s what the people who mobbed trains did. They were hungry, the kids were hungry, been hungry too long, there’s food coming through and its not for you, you lose your temper and go for it. Same thing with the friend, those people were taking apart the tram he was in charge of, he lost his temper and put it in reverse. He didn’t count any noses. Not then! Later, maybe. Because he was sick when he saw what he’d done. But what they had you doing, saying this one lives and that one dies — that’s not a job a person has a right to do, or ask anybody else to do.”
“It’s been a bad time, brother,” the passenger said gently, watching the glaring plain where the shadows of water wavered and drifted with the wind.
The old cargo dirigible wallowed over the mountains and moored in at the airport on Kidney Mountain. Three passengers got off there. Just as the last of them touched ground, the ground picked itself up and bucked. “Earthquake,” he remarked; he was a local coining home. “Damn, look at that dustl Someday well come down here and there won’t be any mountain.”
Two of the passengers chose to wait till the trucks were loaded and ride with them. Shevek chose to walk, since the local said that Chakar was only about six kilometers down the mountain.
The road went in a series of long curves with a short rise at the end of each. The rising slopes to the left of the road and the falling slopes to the right were thick with scrub holum; lines of tall tree holum, spaced just as if they had been planted, followed veins of ground water along the mountainsides. At the crest of a rise Shevek saw the clear gold of sunset above the dark and many-folded hills. There was no sign of mankind here except the road itself, going down into shadow. As he started down, the air grum bled a little and he felt a strangeness: no jolt, no tremor, but a displacement, a conviction that things were wrong. He completed the step he had been making, and the ground was there to meet his foot. He went on; the road stayed lying down. He had been in no danger, but he had never in any danger known himself so close to death. Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind. Shevek felt the cold, clean air in his mouth and lungs. He listened. Remote, a mountain torrent thundered somewhere down in the shadows.