“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”
“Not at all,” Bedap said promptly. “The message is clear: The experiment has succeeded, we’re strong enough now to face you as equals.”
The argument proceeded as before, a rapid hammering of issues. It did not last long. No vote was taken, as usual. Almost everyone present was strongly for sticking to the Terms of the Settlement, and as soon as this became clear Bedap said, “All right, 111 take that as settled. Nobody comes in on the Kuieo Fort or the Mindful. In the matter of bringing Urrasti to Anarres, the Syndicate’s aims clearly must yield to the opinion of the society as a whole; we asked your advice, and we’ll follow it. But there’s another aspect of the same question. Shevek?”
“Well, there’s the question,” Shevek said, “Of sending an Anarresti to Urras.”
There were exclamations and queries. Shevek did not raise his voice, which was not far above a mumble, but persisted. “It wouldn’t harm or threaten anyone living on Anarres. And it appears that it’s a matter of the individual’s right; a kind of test of it, in fact The Terms of the Settlement don’t forbid it. To forbid it now would be an assumption of authority by the PDC, an abridgment of the right of the Odonian individual to initiate action harmless to others.”
Rulag sat forward. She was smiling a little. “Anyone can leave Anarres,” she said. Her light eyes glanced from Shevek to Bedap and back. “He can go whenever he likes, if the propertarians’ freighters will take him. He can’t come back.”
“Who says he can’t?” Bedap demanded,
“The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement. Nobody win be allowed off the freight ships farther than the boundary of the Port of Anarres.”
“Well, now, that was surely meant to apply to Urrasti, not Anarresti,” said an old adviser, Ferdaz, who liked to stick his oar in even when it steered the boat off the course he wanted.
“A person coming from Unas is an Urrasti,” said Rulag.
“Legalisms, legalisms! What’s all this quibbling?” said a calm, heavy woman named Trepil.
“Quibbling!” cried the new member, the young man. He had a Northrising accent and a deep, strong voice. “If you don’t like quibbling, try this. If there are people here that don’t like Anarres, let ’em go. in help, in carry ’em to the Port, 111 even kick ’em there! But if they try to come sneaking back, there’s going to be some of us there to meet them. Some real Odonians. And they won’t find us smiling and saying, “Welcome home, brothers.” They’ll find their teeth knocked down their throats and their balls kicked up into their bellies. Do you understand that? Is it clear enough for you?”
“Clear, no; plain, yes. Plain as a fart,” said Bedap. “Clarity is a function of thought You should learn some Odonianism before you speak here.”
“You’re not worthy to say the name of Odo!” the young man shouted. “You’re traitors, you and the whole Syndicate! There are people all over Anarres watching you. You think we don’t know that Shevek’s been asked to go to Urras, to go sell Anarresti science to the profiteers? You think we don’t know that all you snivelers would love to go there and live rich and let the propertarians pat you on the back? You can got Good riddance! But if you try coming back here, you’ll meet with justice!”
He was on his feet and leaning across the table, shouting straight into Bedap’s face. Bedap looked up at him •and said, “You don’t mean justice, you mean punishment. Do you think they’re the same thing?”
“He means violence,” Rulag said. “And if there is violence, you will have caused it You and your Syndicate. And you will have deserved it.”
A thin, small, middle-aged man beside Trepil began speaking, at first so softly, in a voice hoarsened by the dust cough, that few of them heard him. He was a visiting delegate from a Southwest miners’ syndicate, not expected to speak on this matter. “… what men deserve,” he was baying. “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the Virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” They were, of course, Odo’s words from the Prison Letters, but spoken in the weak, hoarse voice they made a strange effect, as if the man were working them out word by word himself, as if they came from his own heart, slowly, with difficulty, as the water wells up slowly, slowly, from the desert sand.
Rulag listened, her head erect, her face set, like that of a person repressing pain. Across the table from her Shevek sat with his head bowed. The words left a silence after them, and he looked up and spoke into it.
“You see,” be said, “what we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the ride of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution. The Revolution is in the individual spirit, or it is nowhere. It is far all, or it is nothing. If it is seen as having any end, it will never truly begin.’ We can’t stop here. We must go on. We must take the risks.”