He smiled faintly. “In a taxi.”
“Through all the checkpoints? And in that bloodstained coat? And everyone knows what you look like.”
“I was under the back seat. The taxi was commandeered, is that the word? It was a risk some people took for me.” He looked down at his hands, clasped on his lap. He sat perfectly quietly and spoke quietly, but there was an inner tension, a strain, visible in his eyes and in the lines around his mouth. He thought a while, and went on in the same detached way, “It was luck, at first When I came out of hiding, I was lucky not to be arrested at once. But I got into Old Town. After that it was not just luck. They thought for me where I might go, they planned how to get me there, they took the risks.” He said a word in his own language, then translated it: “Solidarity…”
“It is very strange,” said the Ambassador from Terra. “I know almost nothing about your world, Shevek. I know only what the Urrasti tell us, since your people won’t let us come there. I know, of course, that the planet is arid and bleak, and how the colony was founded, that it is an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism, that it has survived for a hundred and seventy years. I have read a little of Odo’s writings — not very much. I thought that it was all rather unimportant to matters on Urras now, rather remote, an interesting experiment. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? It is important. Perhaps Anarres is the key to Urras… The revolutionists in Nio, they come from that same tradition. They weren’t just striking for better wages or protesting the draft. They are not only socialists, they are anarchists; they were striking against power. You see, the size of the demonstration, the intensity of popular feeling, and the government’s panic reaction, all seemed very hard to understand. Why so much commotion? The government here is not despotic. The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving. Why aren’t they satisfied with bread and speeches? Why are they supersensitive?… Now I begin to see why. But what is still inexplicable is that the government of A-Io, knowing this libertarian tradition was still alive, and knowing the discontent in the industrial cities, still brought you here. Like bringing the match to the powder mill!”
“I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it.”
“Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?”
“With the annihilation of space.”
She was silent a while. “Is that what you do?” she said in her mild, amused voice.
“No. It is not what I do! In the first place, I am not an inventor, an engineer. I am a theorist. What they want from me is a theory. A theory of the General Field in temporal physics. Do you know what that is?”
“Shevek, your Cetian physics, your Noble Science, is completely beyond my grasp. I am not trained in mathematics, in physics, in philosophy, and it seems to consist of all of those, and cosmology, and more besides. But I know what you mean when you say the Theory of Simultaneity, in the way I know what is meant by the Theory of Relativity; that is, I know that relativity theory led to certain great practical results; and so I gather that your temporal physics may make new technologies possible.”
He nodded. “What they want,” he said, “is the instantaneous transferral of matter across space. Transilience. Space travel, you see, without traversal of space or lapse of time. They may arrive at it yet; not from my equations, I think. But they can make the ansible, with my equations, if they want it. Men cannot leap the great gaps, but ideas can.”
“What is an ansible, Shevek?”
“An idea.” He smiled without much humor. “It will be a device that will permit communication without any time interval between two points in space. The device will not transmit messages, of course; simultaneity is identity. But to our perceptions, that simultaneity will function as a transmission, a sending. So we will be able to use it to talk between worlds, without the long waiting for the message to go and the reply to return that electromagnetic impulses require. It is really a very simple matter. Like a kind of telephone.”
Keng laughed. “The simplicity of physicists! So I could pick up the — ansible? — and talk with my son in Delhi? And with my granddaughter, who was five when I left, and who lived eleven years while I was traveling from Terra to Unas in a nearly light-speed ship. And I could find out what’s happening at home now, not eleven years ago. And decisions could be made, and agreements reached, and information shared. I could talk to diplomats on Chiffewar, you could talk to physicists on Hain, it wouldn’t take ideas a generation to get from world to world… Do you know, Shevek, I think your very simple matter might change the lives of all the billions of people in the nine Known Worlds?”
He nodded.
“It would make a league of worlds possible. A federation. We have been held apart by the years, the decades between leaving and arriving, between question and response. It’s as if you had invented human speech! We can talk — at last we can talk together.”
“And what will you say?”
His bitterness startled Keng. She looked at him and said nothing.
He leaned forward in his chair and rubbed his forehead painfully. “Look,” he said, “I must explain to you why I have come to you, and why I came to this world also. I came for the idea. For the sake of the idea. To learn, to teach, to share in the idea. On Anarres, you see, we have cut ourselves off. We don’t talk with other people, the rest of humanity. I could not finish my work there. And if I had been able to finish it, they did not want it, they saw no use in it. So I came here. Here is what I need — the talk, the sharing, an experiment in the Light Laboratory that proves something it wasn’t meant to prove, a book of Relativity Theory from an alien world, the stimulus I need. And so I finished the work, at last. It is not written out yet, but I have the equations and the reasoning, it is done. But the ideas in my head aren’t the only ones important to me. My society is also an idea. I was made by it. An idea of freedom, of change, of human solidarity, an important idea. And though I was very stupid I saw at last that by pursuing the one, the physics, I am betraying the other. I am letting the propertarians buy the truth from me.”
“What else could you do, Shevek?”
“Is there no alternative to selling? Is there not such a thing as the gift?”
“Yes—”
“Do you not understand that I want to give this to you — and to Hain and the other worlds — and to the countries of Urras? But to you alü So that one of you cannot use it, as A-Io wants to do, to get power over the others, to get richer or to win more wars. So that you cannot use the truth for your private profit, but only for the common good.”
“In the end, the truth usually insists upon serving only the common good,” Keng said.
“In the end, yes, but I am not willing to wait for the end. I have one lifetime, and I will not spend it for greed and profiteering and lies. I will not serve any master.”
Keng’s calmness was a much more forced, willed affair than it had been at the beginning of their talk. The strength of Shevek’s personality, unchecked by any self-consciousness or consideration of self-defense, was formidable. She was shaken by him, and looked at him with compassion and a certain awe.
“What is it like,” she said, “what can it be like, the society that made you? I heard you speak of Anarres, in the Square, and I wept listening to you, but I didn’t really believe you. Men always speak so of their homes, of the absent land… But you are not like other men. There is a difference in you.”