He caught an omnibus downtown. He was still in a tuny, driven. He was following a pattern and wanted to come to the end of it, come to rest. He went to the Division of Labor Central Posting offices to request a posting to the community to which Takver had gone.
Divlab, with its computers and its huge task of coordination, occupied a whole square; its buildings were handsome, imposing by Anarresti standards, with fine, plain lines. Inside, Central Posting was high-ceilinged and barn-like, very full of people and activity, the walls covered with posting notices and directions as to which desk or department to go to for this business or that. As Shevek waited in one of the lines be listened to the people in front of him, a boy of sixteen and a man in his sixties. The boy was volunteering for a famine-prevention posting. He was full of noble feelings, spilling over with brotherhood, adventurousness, hope. He was delighted to be going off on his own, leaving his childhood behind. He talked a great deal, like a child, in a voice not yet used to its deeper tones. Freedom, freedom! rang in his excited talk, in every word; and the old man’s voice grumbled and rumbled through it, teasing but not threatening, mocking but not cautioning. Freedom, the ability to go somewhere and do something, freedom was what the old man praised and cherished in the young one, even while he mocked his self-importance. Shevek listened to them with pleasure. They broke the morning’s series of grotesques.
As soon as Shevek explained where he wanted to go, the clerk got a worried look, and went off for an atlas, which she opened on the counter between them. “Now look,” she said. She was an ugly little woman with buck teeth; her hands on the colored pages of the atlas were deft and soft. “That’s Rolny, see, the peninsula sticking down into the North Temaenian. It’s just a huge sandpit. There’s nothing on it at all but the marine laboratories away out there at the end, see? Then the coast’s all swamp and salt marsh till you get clear round here to Harmony — a thousand kilometers. And west of it is the Coast Barrens, fhe nearest you could get to Rolny would be some town in the mountains. But they’re not asking for emergency postings there; they’re pretty self-sufficing. Of course, you could go there anyhow,” she added in a slightly different tone.
“It’s too far from Rolny,” he said, looking at the map, noticing in the mountains of Northeast the little isolated town where Takver had grown up. Round Valley. “Don’t they need a janitor at the marine lab? A statistician? Somebody to feed the fish?”
“I’ll check.”
The human/computer network of files in Divlab was set up with admirable efficiency. It did not take the clerk five minutes to get the desired information sorted out from the enormous, continual input and outgo of information concerning every job being done, every position wanted, every workman needed, and the priorities of each in the general economy of the world-wide society. “They just filled an emergency draft — that’s the partner, isn’t it? They got everybody they wanted, four technicians and an experienced seiner. Staff complete.”
Shevek leaned his elbows on the counter and bowed his head, scratching it, a gesture of confusion and defeat masked by self-consciousness. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what to do.”
“Look, brother, how long is the partner’s posting?”
“Indefinite.”
“But it’s a famine-prevention job, isn’t it? It’s not going to go on like this forever. It can’tl It’ll rain, this winter.”
He looked up into his sister’s earnest, sympathetic, harried face. He smiled a little, for he could not leave her effort to give hope without response.
“You’ll get back together. Meanwhile—”
‹Yes. Meanwhile,” he said.
She awaited his decision.
It was his to make; and the options were endless. He could stay in Abbenay and organize classes in physics if he could find volunteer students. He could go to Rolny Peninsula and live with Takver though without any place in the research station. He could live anywhere and do nothing but get up twice a day and go to the nearest commons to be fed. He could do what he pleased.
The identity of the words “work” and “play” in Pravic bad, of course, a strong ethical significance. Odo had seen the danger of a rigid moralism arising from the use of the word “work” in her analogic system: the cells must work together, the optimum working of the organism, the work done by each element, and so forth. Cooperation and function, essential concepts of the Analogy, both im plied work. The proof of an experiment, twenty test tubes in a laboratory or twenty million people on the Moon, is simply, does it work? Odo had seen the moral trap. “The saint is never busy,” she had said, perhaps wistfully.
But the choices of the social being are never made alone.
“Well,” Shevek said, “I just came back from a famine-prevention posting. Anything else like that need doing?”
The clerk gave him an elder-sisterly look, incredulous but forgiving. “There’s about seven hundred Urgent calls posted around the room,” she said. “Which one would you like?”
“Any of them need math?”
“They’re mostly farming and skilled labor. Do you have any engineering training?”
“Not much.”
“Well, there’s work-coordinating. That certainly takes a head for figures. How about this one?”
“All right”
“That’s down in Southwest, in the Dust, you know.”
“I’ve been in the Dust before. Besides, as you say, someday it will rain…”
She nodded, smiling, and typed onto his Divlab record: FROM Abbenay, NW Cent Inst Sd, TO Elbow, SW, wk cot phosphate mill #1: EMERG PSTG; 5-1-3-165 — indefinite.
Chapter 9
Shevek was awakened by the bells in the chapel tower pealing the Prime Harmony for morning religious service. Each note was like a blow on the back of his head. He was so sick and shaky he could not even sit up for a long time. He finally managed to shuffle into the bathroom and take a long cold bath, which relieved the headache; but his whole body continued to feel strange to him — to feel, somehow, vile. As he began to be able to think again, fragments and moments of the night before came into his mind, vivid, senseless little scenes from the party at Vea’s. He tried not to think about them, and then could think of nothing else. Everything, everything became vile. He sat down at his desk, and sat there staring, motionless, perfectly miserable, for half an hour.
He had been embarrassed often enough, and had felt himself a fool. As a young man he had suffered from the sense that others thought him strange, unlike them; in later years he had felt, having deliberately invited, the anger and contempt of many of his fellows on Anarres. But he had never really accepted their judgment. He had never been ashamed.
He did not know that this paralyzing humiliation was a chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache. Nor would the knowledge have made much difference to him. Shame — the sense of vtteness and of self-estrangement — was a revelation. He saw with a new clarity, a hideous clarity; and saw far past those incoherent memories of the end of the evening at Vea’s. It was not only poor Vea who had betrayed him. It was not only the alcohol that he had tried to vomit up; it was all the bread he had eaten on Urras.
He leaned his elbows on the desk and put his head in his hands, pressing in on the temples, the cramped position of pain; and he looked at his life in the light of shame.
On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebeclass="underline" to risk the self for the sake of society.
Here oa Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-indulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve not society, not mankind, not the truth, but the State.