“You don’t understand what time is,” he said. “You say the past is gone, the future is not real, there is no change, no hope. You think Anarres is a future that cannot be reached, as your past cannot be changed. So there is nothing but the present, this Urras, the rich, real, stable present, the moment now. And you think that is something which can be possessed! You envy it a little. You think it’s something you would like to have. But it is no real, you know. It is not stable, not solid — nothing is. Things change, change. You cannot have anything… And least of all can you have the present, unless you accept with it the past and the future. Not only the past but also the future, not only the future but also the past! Because they are reaclass="underline" only their reality makes the present real. You will not achieve or even understand Urras unless you accept the reality, the enduring reality, of Anarres. You are right, we are the key. But when you said that, you did not really believe it. You don’t believe in Anarres. You don’t believe in me, though I stand with you, in this room, in this moment… My people were right, and I was wrong, in this: We cannot come to you. You will not let us. You do not believe in change, in chance, in evolution. You would destroy us rather than admit our reality, rather than admit that there is hope! We cannot come to you. We can only wait for you to come to us.”
Keng sat with a startled and thoughtful, and perhaps slightly dazed, expression.
“I don’t understand — I don’t understand,” she said at last. “You are like somebody from our own past, the old idealists, the visionaries of freedom; and yet I don’t understand you, as if you were trying to tell me of future things; and yet, as you say, you are here, now!…” She had not lost her shrewdness. She said after a little while, “Then why is it that you came to me, Shevek?”
“Oh, to give you the idea. My theory, you know. To save it from becoming a property of the Ioti, an investment or a weapon. If you are willing, the simplest thing to do would be to broadcast the equations, to give them to physicists all over this world, and to the Hainish and the other worlds, as soon as possible. Would you be willing to do that?”
“More than willing.”
“It will come to only a few pages. The proofs and some of the implications would take longer, but that can come later, and other people can work on them if I cannot.”
“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?”