“But what will you do then? Do you mean to go back to Nio? The city is quiet now, apparently; the insurrection seems to be defeated, at least for the time being; but I’m afraid the Ioti government regards you as an insurrectionary. There is Thu, of course—”
“No. I don’t want to stay here. I am no altruist! If you would help me in this too, I might go home. Perhaps the Ioti would be willing to send me home, even. It would be consistent, I think: to make me disappear, to deny my existence. Of course, they might find it easier to do by killing me or putting me in jail for life. I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t want to die here in Hell at all. Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?” He laughed; he had regained all his gentleness of manner. But if you could . send me home, I think they would be relieved. Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.”
“I thought I knew what ‘realism’ was,” Keng said. She smiled, but it was not an easy smile.
“How can you, if you don’t know what hope is?”
“Don’t judge us too hardly, Shevek.”
“I don’t judge you at all. I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return.0
“Nothing? You call your theory nothing?”
“Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit,” he said, turning to her, “and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.”
Chapter 12
“I want to introduce a project,” said Bedap, “from the Syndicate of Initiative. You know that we’ve been in radio contact with Unas for about twenty decads—”
“against the recommendation of this council, and the Defense Federative, and a majority vote of the List!”
“Yes,” Bedap said, looking the speaker up and down, but not protesting the interruption. There were no rules of parliamentary procedure at meetings in PDC. Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a wiring diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place — inside a living animal.
Bedap knew all his old opponents on the Import-Export Council; he had been coming and fighting them for three years now. This speaker was a new one, a young man, probably a new lottery posting to the PDC List Bedap looked him over benevolently and went on, “Let’s not re-fight old quarrels, shall we? I propose a new one. We’ve received an interesting message from a group on Urras. It came on the wave length our Ioti contacts use, but it didn’t come at a scheduled time, and was a weak signal. It seems to have been sent from a country called Benbili, not from A-Io. The group called themselves The Odonian Society.” It appears that they’re post-Settlement Odonians, existing in some fashion in the loopholes of law and government on Urras. Their message was to’the brothers on Anarres.’ You can read it in the Syndicate bulletin, it’s interesting. They ask if they might be allowed to send people here.”
“Send people here? Let Urrasti come here? Spies?”
“No, as settlers.”
“They want the Settlement reopened, is that it, Bedap?”
“They say they’re being hounded by their government, and are hoping for—”
“Reopen the Settlement! To any profiteer who calls himself an Odonian?”
To report an Anarresti managerial debate in full would be difficult; it went very fast, several people often speaking at once, nobody speaking at great length, a good deal of sarcasm, a great deal left unsaid; the tone emotional, often fiercely personal; an end was reached, yet there was no conclusion. It was like an argument among brothers, or among thoughts in an undecided mind.
“If we let these so-called Odonians come, how do they propose to get here?”
There spoke the opponent Bedap dreaded, the cool, intelligent woman named Rulag. She had been his cleverest enemy all year in the council. He glanced at Shevek, who was attending this council for the first time, to draw his attention to her. Somebody had told Bedap that Rulag was an engineer, and he had found in her the engineer’s clarity and pragmatism of mind, plus the mechanist’s hatred of complexity and irregularity. She opposed the Syndicate of Initiative on every issue, including that of its right to exist. Her arguments were good, and Bedap respected her. Sometimes when she spoke of the strength of Urras, and the danger of bargaining with the strong from a position of weakness, he believed her.
For there were times when Bedap wondered, privately, whether he and Shevek, when they got together in the winter of ’68 and discussed the means by which a frustrated physicist might print his work and communicate it to physicists on Urras, had not set off an uncontrollable chain of events. When they had finally set up radio contact, the Urrasti had been more eager to talk, to exchange information, than they had expected; and when they had printed reports of those exchanges, the opposition on Anarres had been more virulent than they had expected. People on both worlds were paying more attention to them than was really comfortable. When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder ft you are, in fact, a traitor.
“I suppose they’d come on one of the freighters,” he replied. “Like good Odonians, they’d hitchhike. If their government, or the Council of World Governments, let them. Would they let them? Would the archists do the anarchists a favor? That’s what I’d like to find out. If we invited a small group, six or eight of these people, what would happen at that end?”
“Laudable curiosity,” Rulag said. “We’d know the danger better, all right, if we knew better how things really work on Urras. But the danger lies in the act of finding out.” She stood up, signifying that she wanted to hold the floor for more than a sentence or two. Bedap winced, and glanced again at Shevek, who sat beside him. “Look out for this one,” he muttered. Shevek made no response, but he was usually reserved and shy at meetings, no good at all unless he got moved deeply by something, in which case he was a surprisingly good speaker. He sat looking down at his hands. But as Rulag spoke, Bedap noticed that though she was addressing him, she kept glancing at Shevek.
“Your Syndicate of Initiative,” she said, emphasizing the pronoun, “has proceeded with building a transmitter, with broadcasting to Urras and receiving from them, and with publishing the communications. You’ve done all this against the advice of the majority of the PDC, and increasing protests from the entire Brotherhood. There have been no reprisals against your equipment or yourselves yet, largely, I believe, because we Odonians have become unused to the very idea of anyone’s adopting a course harmful to others and persisting in it against advice and protest. It’s a rare event In fact, you are the first of us who have behaved in the way that archist critics always predicted people would behave in a society without laws: with total irresponsibility towards the society’s welfare. I don’t propose to go again into the harm you’ve al ready done, and handing out of scientific information to a powerful enemy, the confession of our weakness that each of your broadcasts to Unas represents. But now, thinking that we’ve got used to all that, you’re proposing something very much worse. What’s the difference, you’ll say, between talking to a few Urrasti on the shortwave and talking to a few of them here in Abbenay? What’s the difference? What’s the difference between a shut door and an open one? Let’s open the door — that’s what he’s saying, you know, ammari. Let’s open the door, let the Urrasti come! Six or eight pseudo-Odonians on the next freighter. Sixty or eighty Ioti profiteers on the one after, to look us over and see how we can be divided up as a property among the nations of Urras. And the next trip will be six or eight hundred armed ships of war: guns, soldiers, an occupying force. The end of Anarres, the end of the Promise. Our hope lies, it has lain for a hundred and seventy years, in the Terms of the Settlement: No Urrasti off the ships, except the Settlers, then, or ever. No mixing. No contact To abandon that principle now is to say to the tyrants whom we defeated once, The experiment has failed, come re-enslave usl”