“He played the Urrasti?”
“Yes. He was marvelous.”
“He showed me the play. Several times.”
“Where did you meet him? In Grand Valley?”
“No, before, in Elbow. He was janitor for the mill.”
“Had he chosen that?”
“I don’t think Tir was able to choose at all, by then… Bedap always thought that he was forced to go to Segvina, that he was bullied into asking for therapy. I don’t know. When I saw him, several years after therapy, he was a destroyed person.”
“You think they did something at Segvina—!”
“I don’t know; I think the Asylum does try to offer shelter, a refuge. To judge from their syndical publications, they’re at least altruistic. I doubt that they drove Tir over the edge.”
“But what did break him, then? Just not finding a posting he wanted?”
“The play broke him.”
“The play? The fuss those old turds made about it? Oh, but listen, to be driven crazy by that kind of moralistic scolding you’d have to be crazy already. All he had to do was ignore itl”
“Tir was crazy already. By our society’s standards.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I think Tir’s a bora artist. Not a craftsman — a creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who’s got to turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man •who praises through rage.”
“Was the play that good?” Takver asked naively, coming out an inch or two from the blankets and studying Shevek’s profile.
“No, I don’t think so. It must have been funny on stage. He was only twenty when he wrote it, after all. He keeps writing it over. He’s never written anything else.”
“He keeps writing the same play?”
“He keeps writing the same play.”
“Ugh,” Takver said with pity and disgust.
“Every couple of decads he’d come and show it to me. And I’d read it or make a show of reading it and try to talk with him about it He wanted desperately to talk about it, but he couldn’t He was too frightened.”
“Of what? I don’t understand.”
“Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the human race, the brotherhood that rejected him. When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened.”
“You mean, just because some people called his play immoral and said he shouldn’t get a teaching posting, he decided everybody was against him? That’s a bit silly!”
“But who was for him?”
“Dap was — all his friends.”
“But he lost them. He got posted away.”
“Why didn’t he refuse the posting, then?”
“Listen, Takver. I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. You said it — yon should have refused to to to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I’m a cee man, I didn’t have to come here!… We always think it, and say it, but we don’t do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, ‘don’t have to do anything, I make my own choices, I’m free.’ And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where FDC posts us, and stay till we’re reposted.”
“Oh, Shev, that’s not true. Only since the drought. Before that there wasn’t half so much posting. People just worked up jobs where they wanted them, and joined a syndicate or formed one, and then registered with Div-lab. Divlab mostly posted people who preferred to be in General Labor Fool. It’s going to go back to that again, now.”
“I don’t know. It ought to, of course. But even before the famine it wasnt going in that direction, but away from it Bedap was right: every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this is the •way it was done, this is the way it is done, this is the way it has to be done… There was a lot of that, before the drought Five years of stringent control may have fixed the pattern permanently. Don’t look so skeptical! Listen, you tell me, how many people do you know who refused to accept a posting — even before the famine?”
Takver considered the question. “Leaving out nuchnibi?”
HNo, no. Nuchnibi are important.”
“Well, several of Dap’s friends — that nice composer, Salas, and some of the scruffy ones too. And real nuchnibi used to come through Round Valley when I was a kid. Only they cheated, I always thought They told such lovely lies and stories, and told fortunes, everybody was glad to .see them and keep them and feed them as long as they’d )stay. But they never would stay long. But then people would just pick up and leave town, kids usually, some of them just hated farm work, and they’d just quit their posting and leave. People do that everywhere, all the time. They move on, looking for something better. You just don’t call it refusing posting!”
“Why not?”
“What are you getting at?” Takver grumbled, retiring further under the blanket.
“Well, this. That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it We don’t cooperate — we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don’t believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, lawa of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we cant see them, because they’re part of our thinking. Tir never did that. I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel He was a natural Odonian — a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for Ms first free act.”
“I don’t think,” Takver said, muffled in the bed, and defensively, “that Tir was a very strong person.”
“’No, he was extremely vulnerable.”
There was a long silence.
“No wonder be haunts you,” she said. “His play. Your book.”
“But I’m luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist cant hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.”
Takver watched him from the corner of her eye for some time, then turned over and sat up, pulling the blanket up around her shoulders. “Err! It’s cold… I was wrong, wasn’t I, about the book. About letting Sabul cut it up and put his name on it. It seemed right It seemed like setting the work before the workman, pride before vanity, community before ego, all that. But it wasn’t really that at all, was it? It was a capitulation. A surrender to Sabul’s authoritarianism.”
“I don’t know. It did get the thing printed.”
“The right end, but the wrong means! I thought about it for a long time, at Rolny, Shev. Ill tell you what was wrong. I was pregnant. Pregnant women have no ethics. Only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse. To hell with the book, and the partnership, and the truth, if they threaten the precious fetus! It’s a racial preservation drive, but it can work right against community; it’s biological, not social. A man can be grateful he never gets into the grip of it. But he’d better realize than a woman can, and watch out for it. I think that’s why the old archisms used women as property. Why did the women let them? Because they were pregnant all the time — because they were already possessed, enslaved!”