The youngest of the men who had come with him sat down across the hearth from him. The other two were still talking. They were talking physics, but Shevek did not try to follow what they said. The young man spoke quietly. “I wonder how you must feel, Dr. Shevek.”
Shevek stretched out his legs and leaned forward to catch the warmth of the fire on his face. “I feel heavy.”
“Heavy?”
“Perhaps the gravity. Or I am tired.”
He looked at the other man, but through the hearth glow the face was not clear, only the glint of a gold chain and the deep jewel red of the robe.
“I don’t know your name.”
“Saio Pae.”
“Oh, Pae, yes. I know your articles on Paradox.”
He spoke heavily, dreamily.
“There’ll be a bar here, Senior Faculty rooms always have a liquor cabinet. Would you care for something to drink?”
“Water, yes.”
The young man reappeared with a glass of water as the other two came to join them at the hearth, Shevek drank off the water thirstily and sat looking down at the glass in his hand, a fragile, finely shaped piece that caught the gleam of the fire on its rim of gold. He was aware of the three men, of their attitudes as they sat or stood near him, protective, respectful, proprietary.
He looked up at them, one face after the other. They all looked at him, expectant. “Well, you have me,” he said. He smiled. “You have your anarchist. What are you going to do with him?”
Chapter 2
In a square window in a white wall is the clear, bare sky. In the center of the sky is the sun.
There are eleven babies in the room, most of them cooped up in large, padded pen-cots in pairs or trios, and settling down, with commotion and elocution, into their naps. The two eldest remain at large, a fat active one dismembering a pegboard and a knobby one sitting in the square of yellow sunlight from the window, staring up the sunbeam with an earnest and stupid expression.
In the anteroom the matron, a one-eyed woman with grey hair, confers with a tall, sad-looking man of thirty. “The mother’s been posted to Abbenay,” the man says. “She wants him to stay here.”
“Shall we take him into the nursery full-time, then, Palat?”
“Yes. I’ll be moving back into a dorm.”
“Don’t worry, he knows us all here! But surely Divlab will send you along after Rulag soon? Since you’re partners, and both engineers?”
“Yes, but she’s… It’s the Central Institute of Engineering that wants her, see. I’m not that good. Rulag has a great work to do.”
The matron nodded, and sighed. “Even so — !” she said with energy, and did not say anything else.
The father’s gaze was on the knobby infant, who had not noticed his presence in the anteroom, being preoccupied with light. The fat infant was at this moment coming towards the knobby one rapidly, though with a peculiar squatting gait caused by a damp and sagging diaper. He approached out of boredom or sociability, but once in the square of sunlight he discovered it was warm there. He sat down heavily beside the knobby one, crowding him into the shade.
The knobby one’s blank rapture gave place at once to a scowl of rage. He pushed the fat one, shouting, “Go ’way!”
The matron was there at once. She righted the fat one. “Shev, you aren’t to push other people.”
The knobby baby stood up. His face was a glare of sunlight and anger. His diapers were about to fall off. “Mine!” he said in a high, ringing voice. “Mine sun!”
“It is not yours,” the one-eyed woman said with the mildness of utter certainty. “Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it” And she picked the knobby baby up with gentle inexorable hands and set him aside, out of the square of sunlight.
The fat baby sat staring, indifferent. The knobby one shook all over, screamed, “Mine sun!” and burst into tears of rage.
The father picked him up and held him. “There, now, Shev,” he said. “Come on, you know you can’t have things. What’s wrong with you?” His voice was soft, and shook as if he also was not far from tears. The thin, long, light child in his arms wept passionately.
“There are some just can’t take life easy,” the one-eyed woman said, watching with sympathy.
“I’ll take him for a dom visit now. The mother’s leaving tonight, you see.”
“Go on. I hope you get posted together soon,” said the matron, hoisting the fat child like a sack of grain onto her hip, her face melancholy and her good eye squinting. “Byebye, Shev, little heart. Tomorrow, listen, tomorrow we’ll play truck-and-driver.”
The baby did not forgive her yet. He sobbed, clutching his father’s neck, and hid his face in the darkness of the lost sun.
The Orchestra needed all the benches that morning for rehearsal, and the dance group was thumping around in the big room of the learning center, so the kids who were working on Speaking-and-Listening sat in a circle on the foamstone floor of the workshop. The first volunteer, a lanky eight-year-old with long hands and feet, stood up. He stood very erect, as healthy children do; his slightly fuzzy face was pale at first, then turned red as he waited for the other children to listen. “Go on, Shevek,” the group director said.
“Well, I had an idea.”
“Louder,” said the director, a heavy-set man in his early twenties.
The boy smiled with embarrassment. “Well, see, I was thinking, let’s say you throw a rock at something. At a tree. You throw it, and it goes through the air and hits the tree. Right? But it can’t. Because — can I have the slate? Look, here’s you throwing the rock, and here’s the tree,” he scribbled on the slate, “that’s supposed to be a tree, and here’s the rock, see, halfway in between.” The children giggled at his portrayal of a holum tree, and he smiled. “To get from you to the tree, the rock has to be halfway in between you and the tree, doesn’t it. And then it has to be halfway between halfway and the tree. And then it has to be halfway between that and the tree. It doesn’t matter how far it’s gone, there’s always a place, only it’s a time really, that’s halfway between the last place it was and the tree—”
“Do you think this is interesting?” the director interrupted, speaking to the other children.
“Why can’t it reach the tree?” said a girl of ten.
“Because it always has to go half of the way that’s left to go,” said Shevek, “and there’s always half of the way left to go — see?”
“Shall we just say you aimed the rock badly?” the director said with a tight smile.
“It doesn’t matter how you aim it. It can’t reach the tree.”
“Who told you this idea?”
“Nobody. I sort of saw it. I think I see how the rock actually does—”
“That’s enough.”
Some of the other children had been talking, but they stopped as if struck dumb. The little boy with the slate stood there in the silence. He looked frightened, and scowled.
“Speech is sharing — a cooperative art. You’re not sharing, merely egoizing.”
The thin, vigorous harmonies of the orchestra sounded down the hall.
“You didn’t see that for yourself, it wasn’t spontaneous. I’ve read something very like it in a book.”
Shevek stared at the director. “What book? Is there one here?”
The director stood up. He was about twice as tall and three times as heavy as his opponent, and it was clear in his face that he disliked the child intensely; but there was no threat of physical violence in his stance, only an assertion of authority, a little weakened by his irritable response to the child’s odd question. “No! And stop egoizing!” Then he resumed his melodious pedantic tone: “This kind of thing is really directly contrary to what we’re after in a Speaking-and-Listening group. Speech is a two-way function. Shevek isn’t ready to understand that yet, as most of you are, and so his presence is disruptive to the group. You feel that yourself, don’t you, Shevek? I’d suggest that you find another group working on your level”