“But what’s the good of this sort of ‘understanding’,” Dearri said, “if it doesn’t result in practical, technological applications? Just word juggling, isn’t it.”
“You ask questions like a true profiteer,” Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dearri with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction. Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, “I don’t really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book — that everything really all exists now — then couldn’t we foretell the future? If it’s already there?”
“No, no,” the shyer man said, not at all shyly. “It’s not there like a couch or a house. Time isn’t space. You can’t walk around in it!” Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dearri and said, “It seems to me the application of temporal physics is in ethics. Would you agree to that, Dr. Shevek?”
“Ethics? Well, I don’t know. I do mostly mathematics, you know. You cannot make equations of ethical behavior.”
“Why not?” said Dearri.
Shevek ignored him. “But it’s true, chronosophy does involve ethics. Because our sense of time involves our ability to separate cause and effect, means and end. The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To say that a good end will follow from a bad means is just like saying that if I pull a rope on this pulley it will lift the weight on that one. To break a promise is to deny the reality of the past; therefore it is to deny the hope of a real future. If time and reason are functions of each other, if we are creatures of time, then we had better know it, and try to make the best of it. To act responsibly.”
“But look here,” said Dearri, with ineffable satisfaction in his own keenness, “you just said that in your Simultaneity system there is no past and future, only a sort of eternal present. So how can you be responsible for the book that’s already written? All you can do is read it. There’s no choice, no freedom of action left.”
“That is the dilemma of determinism. You are quite right, it is implicit in Simultanist thinking. But Sequency thinking also has its dilemma. It is like this, to make a foolish little picture — you are throwing a rock at a tree, and if you are a Simultanist the rock has already hit the tree, and if you are a Sequentist it never can. So which do you choose? Maybe you prefer to throw rocks without thinking about it, no choice. I prefer to make things difficult, and choose both.”
“How — how do you reconcile them?” the shy man asked earnestly.
Shevek nearly laughed in despair. “I don’t know. I have been working a long time on it! After all, the rock does hit the tree. Neither pure sequency nor pure unity will explain it. We don’t want purity, but complexity, the relationship of cause and effect, means and end. Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question…”
“All very well, but what industry needs is answers,” said Dearri.
Shevek turned slowly, looked down at him, and said nothing at all.
There was a heavy silence, into which Vea leapt, graceful and inconsequential, returning to her theme of foreseeing the future. Others were drawn in by this topic, and they all began telling their experiences with fortunetellers and clairvoyants.
Shevek resolved to say nothing more, no matter what he was asked. He was thirstier than ever; he let the waiter refill his glass, and drank the pleasant, fizzy stuff. He looked around the room, trying to dissipate his anger and tension in watching other people. But they were also behaving very emotionally, for Ioti — shouting, laughing loudly, interrupting each other. One pair was indulging in sexual foreplay in a corner. Shevek looked away, disgusted. Did they egoize even in sex? To caress and copulate in front of unpaired people was as vulgar as to eat in front of hungry people. He returned his attention to the group around him. They were off prediction, now, and onto politics. They were all disputing about the war, about what Thu would do next, what A-Io would do next, what the CWG would do next.
“Why do you talk only in abstractions?” he inquired suddenly, wondering as he spoke why he was speaking, when he had resolved not to. “It is not names of countries, it is people killing each other. Why do the soldiers go? Why does a man go kill strangers?”
“But that’s what soldiers are for,” said a little fair woman with an opal in her navel. Several men began to explain the principle of national sovereignty to Shevek. Vea interrupted, “But let him talk. How would you solve the mess, Shevek?”
“Solution’s in plain sight.”
“Where?”
“Anarres!”
“But what you people do on the Moon doesn’t solve our problems here.”
“Man’s problem is all the same. Survival. Species, group, individual.”
“National self-defense—” somebody shouted.
They argued, he argued. He knew what he wanted to say, and knew it must convince everyone because it was clear and true, but somehow he could not get it said properly. Everybody shouted. The little fair woman patted the broad arm of the chair she was sitting in, and he sat down on it. Her shaven, silken head came peering up under his arm. “Hello, Moon Man!” she said. Vea had joined another group for a time, but now was back near him. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked large and liquid. He thought he saw Pae across the room, but there were so many faces that they blurred together. Things happened in fits and starts, with blanks in between, as if he were being allowed to witness the operation of the Cyclic Cosmos of old Gvarab’s hypothesis from behind the scenes. “The principle of legal authority must be upheld, or we’ll degenerate into mere anarchy!” thundered a fat, frowning man. Shevek said, “Yes, yes, degenerate! We have enjoyed it for one hundred and fifty years now.” The little fair woman’s toes, in silver sandals, peeped out from under her skirt, which was sewn all over with hundreds and hundreds of tiny pearls. Vea said, “But tell us about Anarres — what’s it really like? Is it so wonderful there really?”
He was sitting on the arm of the chair, and Vea was curled up on the hassock at his knees, erect and supple, her soft breasts staring at him with their blind eyes, her face smiling, complacent, flushed.
Something dark turned over in Shevek’s mind, darkening everything. His mouth was dry. He finished the glassful the waiter had just poured him. “I don’t know,” he said; his tongue felt half paralyzed. “No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dust and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful, here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free — possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes — the wall, the wall!”