All quotes from the novel:
Chapter 3:
This room was evidently for his sole use, as it opened off the
bedroom, and contained only one of each kind of fixture, though each
was of a sensuous luxury that far surpassed mere eroticism and
partook, in Shevek’s view, of a kind of ultimate apotheosis of the
excremental.
Since those days Shevek had worked with many people of talent, but
because he had never been a full-time member of the Abbenay Institute,
he had never been able to take them far enough; they remained bogged
down in the old problems, the classical Sequency physics. He had had
no equals. Here, in the realm of inequity, he met them at last.
Pae coughed. “Scientists. Oh, yes, certainly, they’re all men. There
are some female teachers in the girls’ schools, of course. But they
never get past Certificate level.”
Reminded me of how girls' schools were originally staffed by female teachers. They have lower qualifications because they couldn't access them.
Shevek returned to sit on the marble seat by the hearth, which he
already felt as his seat, his territory. He wanted a territory. He
felt the need for caution. But he felt more strongly the need that had
brought him across the dry abyss from the other world, the need for
communication, the wish to unbuild walls.
The wall. Shevek knew the wall, by now, when he came up against it.
The wall was this young man’s charm, courtesy, indifference.
.
“I think you are afraid of me, Pae,” he said, abruptly and genially.
“Afraid of you, sir?” “Because I am, by my existence, disproof of the
necessity of the state. But what is to fear? I will not hurt you, Saio
Pae, you know. I am personally quite harmless…Listen, I am not a
doctor. We do not use titles. I am called Shevek.”
“I know, I’m sorry, sir. In our terms, you see, it seems
disrespectful. It just doesn’t seem right.” He apologized winningly,
expecting forgiveness.
“Can you not recognize me as an equal?” Shevek asked, watching him
without either forgiveness or anger.
Pae was for once nonplused. “But really, sir, you are, you know, a
very important man—”
“There is no reason why you should change your habits for me,” Shevek
said. “It does not matter. I thought you might be glad to be free of
the unnecessary, that’s all.”
I love this exchange.
A-Io had led the world for centuries, they said, in ecological control
and the husbanding of natural resources. The excesses of the Ninth
Millennium were ancient history, their only lasting effect being the
shortage of certain metals, which fortunately could be imported from
the Moon.
Reading over this bit again, it strikes me as odd that Le Guin didn't include the fact that Anarres is essentially a 'free' mining colony of Urras in the discussion that Shevek has with the Keng (the Terran ambassador). It would've been a stronger hit in how Urras is hell and how it being hell continues to impact on Anarres's ability to communicate and interact with other planets and species.
Laia Asieo Odo 698—769
To be whole is to be part;
true voyage is return.
I still really like this epitaph.
“You have so much,” Shevek said to the engineer who had taken charge
of him, a man named Oegeo. “You have so much to work with, and you
work with it so well. This is magnificent—the coordination, the
cooperation, the greatness of the enterprise.”
“Couldn’t swing anything on this scale where you come from, eh?” the
engineer said, grinning.
“Spaceships? Our space fleet is the ships the Settlers came in from
Urras—built here on Urras—nearly two centuries ago. To build just a
ship to carry grain across the sea, a barge, it takes a year’s
planning, a big effort of our economy.”
Oegeo nodded. “Well, we’ve got the goods, all right. But you know,
you’re the man who can tell us when to scrap this whole job—throw it
all away.”
“Throw it away? What do you mean?”
“Faster than light travel,” Oegeo said. “Transilience. The old physics
says it isn’t possible. The Terrans say it isn’t possible. But the
Hainish, who after all invented the drive we use now, say that it is
possible, only they don’t know how to do it, because they’re just
learning temporal physics from us. Evidently if it’s in anybody’s
pocket, anybody in the known worlds, Dr. Shevek, it’s in yours.”
This interaction is really good, too.
When they were in the car and the chauffeur was closing the doors,
Chifoilisk (another probable source of Pae’s ill humor) asked, “What
did you want to see another castle for, Shevek? Should have thought
you’d had enough old ruins to hold you for a while.”
“The Fort in Drio was where Odo spent nine years,” Shevek replied. His
face was set, as it had been since he talked with Oegeo. “After the
Insurrection of 747. She wrote the Prison Letters there, and the
Analogy.”
“Afraid it’s been pulled down,” Pae said sympathetically. “Drio was a
moribund sort of town, and the Foundation just wiped out and started
fresh.”
I enjoy some of the parallels that Odo has with past radicals. Specifically, we get a call back to Gramsci's Prison Notebooks here.
I have been here for a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am
still here. What are you doing here?
He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and bounty of this
world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the
faithfulness of its people. Paradise is for those who make Paradise.
He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had
denied their past, their history. The Settlers of Anarres had turned
their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only.
But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the
future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had
been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history,
to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come
back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only
an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.
Chapter 4:
They brought fossil oils and petroleum products, certain delicate
machine parts and electronic components that Anarresti manufacturing
was not geared to supply, and often a new strain of fruit tree or
grain for testing. They took back to Urras a full load of mercury,
copper, aluminum, uranium, tin, and gold. It was, for them, a very
good bargain. The division of their cargoes eight times a year was the
most prestigious function of the Urrasti Council of World Governments
and the major event of the Urrasti world stock market. In fact, the
Free World of Anarres was a mining colony of Urras.
The fact galled. Every generation, every year, in the PDC debates of
Abbenay, fierce protests were made: “Why do we continue these
profiteering business transactions with warmaking propertarians?” And
cooler heads always gave the same answer: “It would cost the Urrasti
more to dig the ores themselves; therefore they don’t invade us. But
if we broke the trade agreement, they would use force.” It is hard,
however, for people who have never paid money for anything to
understand the psychology of cost, the argument of the marketplace.
Seven generations of peace had not brought trust.
See, this bit right here should've been brought up again in the conversation with Keng because it would've worked well to highlight the idea of "This may be your paradise, but your paradise is built upon the backs of those it still harms and holds sway over."
Therefore the work-posting called Defense never had to call for
volunteers. Most Defense work was so boring that it was not called
work in Pravic, which used the same word for work and play, but
kleggich, drudgery. Defense workers manned the twelve old
interplanetary ships, keeping them repaired and in orbit as a guard
network; maintained radar and radio-telescopic scans in lonesome
places; did dull duty at the Port. And yet they always had a waiting
list. However pragmatic the morality a young Anarresti absorbed, yet
life overflowed in him, demanding altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for
the absolute gesture. Loneliness, watchfulness, danger, spaceships:
they offered the lure of romance.
For two hundred years after the first landing Anarres was explored,
mapped, investigated, but not colonized. Why move to a howling desert
when there was plenty of room in the gracious valleys of Urras?
But it was mined. The self-plundering eras of the Ninth and early
Tenth Millennia had left the lodes of Urras empty; and as rocketry was
perfected, it became cheaper to mine the Moon than to extract needed
metals from low-grade ores or sea water. In the Urrasti year IX-738 a
settlement was founded at the foot of the Ne Thera Mountains, where
mercury was mined, in the old Ans Hos. They called the place Anarres
Town. It was not a town, there were no women. Men signed on for two or
three years’ duty as miners or technicians, then went home to the real
world.
The Moon and its mines were under the jurisdiction of the Council of
World Governments, but around in the Moon’s eastern hemisphere the
nation of Thu had a little secret: a rocket base and a settlement of
goldminers, with their wives and children. They really lived on the
Moon, but nobody knew it except their government. It was the collapse
of that government in the year 771 that led to the proposal, in the
Council of World Governments, of giving the Moon to the International
Society of Odonians—buying them off with a world, before they fatally
undermined the authority of law and national sovereignty on Urras.
Anarres Town was evacuated, and from the midst of the turmoil in Thu a
couple of hasty final rockets were sent to pick up the goldminers. Not
all of them chose to return. Some of them liked the howling desert.
For over twenty years the twelve ships granted to the Odonian Settlers
by the Council of World Governments went back and forth between the
worlds, until the million souls who chose the new life had all been
brought across the dry abyss. Then the port was closed to immigration
and left open only to the freight ships of the Trade Agreement. By
then Anarres Town held a hundred thousand people, and had been renamed
Abbenay, which meant, in the new language of the new society, Mind.
Ugh, I love this description. It's frustrating but also gorgeously written.
Decentralization had been an essential element in Odo’s plans for the
society she did not live to see founded. She had no intention of
trying to de-urbanize civilization. Though she suggested that the
natural limit to the size of a community lay in its dependence on its
own immediate region for essential food and power, she intended that
all communities be connected by communication and transportation
networks, so that goods and ideas would get where they were wanted,
and the administration of things might work with speed and ease, and
no community should be cut off from change and interchange. But the
network was not to be run from the top down. There was to be no
controlling center, no capital, no establishment for the
self-perpetuating machinery of bureaucracy and the dominance drive of
individuals seeking to become captains, bosses, chiefs of state.
Her plans, however, had been based on the generous ground of Urras.
When Shevek was nine his afternoon schoolwork for several months had
been caring for the ornamental plants in Wide Plains
community—delicate exotics, that had to be fed and sunned like babies.
He had assisted an old man in the peaceful and exacting task, had
liked him and liked the plants, and the dirt, and the work. When he
saw the color of the Plain of Abbenay he remembered the old man, and
the smell of fish-oil manure, and the color of the first leafbuds on
small bare branches, that clear vigorous green.
The elements that made up Abbenay were the same as in any other
Odonian community, repeated many times: workshops, factories,
domiciles, dormitories, learning centers, meeting halls,
distributories, depots, refectories. The bigger buildings were most
often grouped around open squares, giving the city a basic cellular
texture: it was one subcommunity or neighborhood after another. Heavy
industry and food-processing plants tended to cluster on the city’s
outskirts, and the cellular pattern was repeated in that related
industries often stood side by side on a certain square or street.
Children were around, some involved in the work with the adults, some
underfoot making mudpies, some busy with games in the street, one
sitting perched up on the roof of the learning center with her nose
deep in a book.
No doors were locked, few shut. There were no disguises and no
advertisements. It was all there, all the work, all the life of the
city, open to the eye and to the hand.
Shevek turned to go. Sabul raised his growl: “Keep those books with
you! They’re not for general consumption.”
The young man paused, turned back, and said after a moment in his
calm, rather diffident voice, “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t let anybody else read them!”
I kind of wish Sabul took a stronger presence to further highlight the irony of possession in a society without possessions.
Sabul got up again and came close to him. “Listen. You’re now a member
of the Central Institute of Sciences, a Physics syndic, working with
me, Sabul. You follow that? Privilege is responsibility. Correct?”
“I’m to acquire knowledge which I’m not to share,” Shevek said after a
brief pause, stating the sentence as if it were a proposition in
logic.
“If you found a pack of explosive caps in the street would you ‘share’
them with every kid that went by? Those books are explosives. Now do
you follow me?”
“Yes.”
“All right” Sabul turned away, scowling with what appeared to be an
endemic, not a specific rage. Shevek left, carrying the dynamite
carefully, with revulsion and devouring curiosity.
He set to work to learn Iotic. He worked alone in Room 46, because of
Sabul’s warning, and because it came only too naturally to him to work
alone.
Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was
unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such
difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being
incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it. The reliable and
affectionate presence of adults who are also, in their own way,
different, is the only reassurance such a child can have; and Shevek
had not had it. His father had indeed been utterly reliable and
affectionate. Whatever Shevek was and whatever he did, Palat approved
and was loyal. But Palat had not had this curse of difference. He was
like the others, like all the others to whom community came so easy.
He loved Shevek, but he could not show him what freedom is, that
recognition of each person’s solitude which alone transcends it.
Thus Shevek discovered that not only petroleum and mercury went back
and forth between the sundered worlds, and not only books, such as the
books he had been reading, but also letters. Letters! Letters to
propertarians, to subjects of governments founded on the inequity of
power, to individuals who were inevitably exploited by and exploiters
of others, because they had consented to be elements in the
State-Machine. Did such people actually exchange ideas with free
people in a nonaggressive, voluntary manner? Could they really admit
equality and participate in intellectual solidarity, or were they
merely trying to dominate, to assert their power, to possess? The idea
of actually exchanging letters with a propertarian alarmed him, but it
would be interesting to find out…
The first, and still the least acceptable, of these discoveries was
that he was supposed to learn Iotic but keep his knowledge to himself:
a situation so new to him and morally so confusing that he had not yet
worked it out. Evidently he did not exactly harm anybody by not
sharing his knowledge with them. On the other hand what conceivable
harm could it do them to know that he knew Iotic, and that they could
learn it too? Surely freedom lay rather in openness than in secrecy,
and freedom is always worth the risk. He could not see what the risk
was, anyway. It occurred to him once that Sabul wanted to keep the new
Urrasti physics private—to own it, as a property, a source of power
over his colleagues on Anarres. But this idea was so counter to
Shevek’s habits of thinking that it had great difficulty getting
itself clear in his mind, and when it did he suppressed it at once,
with contempt, as a genuinely disgusting thought.
Then there was the private room, another moral thorn. As a child, if
you slept alone in a single it meant you had bothered the others in
the dormitory until they wouldn’t tolerate you; you had egoized.
Solitude equated with disgrace. In adult terms, the principal referent
for single rooms was a sexual one. Every domicile had a number of
singles, and a couple that wanted to copulate used one of these free
singles for a night, or a decad, or as long as they liked. A couple
undertaking partnership took a double room; in a small town where no
double was available, they often built one on to the end of a
domicile, and long, low, straggling buildings might thus be created
room by room, called “partners’ truck trains.” Aside from sexual
pairing there was no reason for not sleeping in a dormitory. You could
choose a small one or a large one, and if you didn’t like your
roommates, you could move to another dormitory. Everybody had the
workshop, laboratory, studio, barn, or office that he needed for his
work; one could be as private or as public as one chose in the baths;
sexual privacy was freely available and socially expected; and beyond
that privacy was not functional. It was excess, waste. The economy of
Anarres would not support the building, maintenance, heating, lighting
of individual houses and apartments. A person whose nature was
genuinely unsociable had to get away from society and look after
himself. He was completely free to do so. He could build himself a
house wherever he liked (though if it spoiled a good view or a fertile
bit of land he might find himself under heavy pressure from his
neighbors to move elsewhere). There were a good many solitaries and
hermits on the fringes of the older Anarresti communities, pretending
that they were not members of a social species. But for those who
accepted the privilege and obligation of human solidarity, privacy was
a value only where it served a function.
There was always a dessert at the Institute refectory at dinner.
Shevek enjoyed it very much, and when there were extras he took them.
And his conscience, his organic-societal conscience, got indigestion.
Didn’t everybody at every refectory, from Abbenay to Uttermost, get
the same, share and share alike? He had always been told so and had
always found it so. Of course there were local variations: regional
specialties, shortages, surpluses, makeshifts in situations such as
Project Camps, poor cooks, good cooks, in fact an endless variety
within the unchanging framework. But no cook was so talented that he
could make a dessert without the makings. Most refectories served
dessert once or twice a decad. Here it was served nightly. Why? Were
the members of the Central Institute of the Sciences better than other
people?
Shevek did not ask these questions of anyone else. The social
conscience, the opinion of others, was the most powerful moral force
motivating the behavior of most Anarresti, but it was a little less
powerful in him than in most of them. So many of his problems were of
a kind other people did not understand that he had got used to working
them out for himself, in silence. So he did with these problems, which
were much harder for him, in some ways, than those of temporal
physics. He asked no one’s opinion. He stopped taking dessert at the
refectory.
He did not, however, move to a dormitory. He weighed the moral
discomfort against the practical advantage, and found the latter
heavier. He worked better in the private room. The job was worth doing
and he was doing it well. It was centrally functional to his society.
The responsibility justified the privilege.
So he worked.
He looked at the book the older man held out: a thin book, bound in
green, the Circle of Life on the cover. He took it and looked at the
title page: “A Critique of Atro’s Infinite Sequency Hypothesis.” It
was his essay, Atro’s acknowledgment and defense, and his reply. It
had all been translated or retranslated into Pravic, and printed by
the PDC presses in Abbenay. There were two authors’ names: Sabul,
Shevek.
Sabul craned his neck over the copy Shevek held, and gloated. His
growl became throaty and chuckling. “We’ve finished Atro. Finished
him, the damned profiteer! Now let them try to talk about ‘puerile
imprecision’!” Sabul had nursed ten years’ resentment against the
Physics Review of Ieu Eun University, which had referred to his
theoretical work as “crippled by provincialism and the puerile
imprecision with which Odonian dogma infects every area of thought.”
“They’ll see who’s provincial now!” he said, grinning. In nearly a
year’s acquaintance Shevek could not recall having seen him smile.
Shevek sat down across the room, clearing a pile of papers off a bench
to do so; the physics office was of course communal, but Sabul kept
this back room of the two littered with materials he was using, so
that there never seemed to be quite room for anyone else. Shevek
looked down at the book he still held, then out the window. He felt,
and looked, rather ill. He also looked tense; but with Sabul he had
never been shy or awkward, as he often was with people whom he would
have liked to know. “I didn’t know you were translating it,” he said.
“Translated it, edited it. Polished some of the rougher spots, filled
in transitions you’d left out, and so forth. Couple of decads’ work.
You should be proud of it, your ideas to a large extent form the
groundwork of the finished book.”
It consisted entirely of Shevek’s and Atro’s ideas.
“Yes,” Shevek said. He looked down at his hands. Presently he said,
“I’d like to publish the paper I wrote this quarter on Reversibility.
It ought to go to Atro. It would interest him. He’s still hung up on
causation.”
“Publish it? Where?”
“In Iotic, I meant—on Urras. Send it to Atro, like this last one, and
he’ll put it in one of the journals there.”
“You can’t give them a work to publish that hasn’t been printed here.”
“But that’s what we did with this one. All this, except my rebuttal,
came out in the Ieu Eun Review—before this came out here.”
“I couldn’t prevent that, but why do you think I hurried this into
print? You don’t think everybody in PDC approves of our trading ideas
with Urras like this, do you? Defense insists that every word that
leaves here on those freighters be passed by a PDC-approved expert.
And on top of that, do you think all the provincial physicists who
don’t get in on this pipeline to Urras don’t begrudge our using it?
Think they aren’t envious? There are people lying in wait, lying in
wait for us to make a false step. If we’re ever caught doing it, we’ll
lose that mail slot on the Urrasti freighters. You see the picture
now?”
“How did the Institute get that mail slot in the first place?”
“Pegvur’s election to the PDC, ten years ago.” Pegvur had been a
physicist of moderate distinction. “I’ve trod damned carefully to keep
it, ever since. See?”
Shevek nodded.
“In any case, Atro doesn’t want to read that stuff of yours. I looked
that paper over and gave it back to you decads ago. When are you going
to stop wasting time on these reactionary theories Gvarab clings to?
Can’t you see she’s wasted her whole life on ’em? If you keep at it,
you’re going to make a fool of yourself. Which, of course, is your
inalienable right. But you’re not going to make a fool of me.”
“What if I submit the paper for publication here, in Pravic, then?”
“Waste of time.”
Shevek absorbed this with a slight nod. He got up, lanky and angular,
and stood a moment, remote among his thoughts. The winter light lay
harsh on his hair, which he now wore pulled back in a queue, and his
still face. He came to the desk and took a copy off the little stock
of new books. “I’d like to send one of these to Mitis,” he said.
“Take all you want. Listen. If you think you know what you’re doing
better than I do, then submit that paper to the Press. You don’t need
permission! This isn’t some kind of hierarchy, you know! I can’t stop
you. All I can do is give you my advice.”
“You’re the Press Syndicate’s consultant on manuscripts in physics,”
Shevek said. “I thought I’d save time for everyone by asking you now.”
His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for
dominance, he was indomitable.
“Save time, what do you mean?” Sabul growled, but Sabul was also an
Odonian: he writhed as if physically tormented by his own hypocrisy,
turned away from Shevek, turned back to him, and said spitefully, his
voice thick with anger. “Go ahead! Submit the damned thing! I’ll
declare myself incompetent to give counsel on it. I’ll tell them to
consult Gvarab. She’s the Simultaneity expert, not I. The mystical
gagaist! The universe as a giant harp-string, oscillating in and out
of existence! What note does it play, by the way? Passages from the
Numerical Harmonies, I suppose? The fact is that I am incompetent—in
other words, unwilling—to counsel PDC or the Press on intellectual
excrement!”
“The work I’ve done for you,” Shevek said, “is part of the work I’ve
done following Gvarab’s ideas in Simultaneity. If you want one, you’ll
have to stand the other. Grain grows best in shit, as we say in
Northsetting.”
He stood a moment, and getting no verbal reply from Sabul, said
goodbye and left.
He knew he had won a battle, and easily, without apparent violence.
But violence had been done.
As Mitis had predicted, he was “Sabul’s man.” Sabul had ceased to be a
functioning physicist years ago; his high reputation was built on
expropriations from other minds. Shevek was to do the thinking, and
Sabul would take the credit.
Obviously an ethically intolerable situation, which Shevek would
denounce and relinquish. Only he would not. He needed Sabul. He wanted
to publish what he wrote and to send it to the men, who could
understand it, the Urrasti physicists; he needed their ideas, their
criticism, their collaboration.
So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like profiteers. It had
not been a battle, but a sale. You give me this and I’ll give you
that. Refuse me and I’ll refuse you. Sold? Sold! Shevek’s career, like
the existence of his society, depended on the continuance of a
fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual
aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but
mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
At the clinic they diagnosed his insanity as a light pneumonia and
told him to go to bed in Ward Two. He protested. The aide accused him
of egoizing and explained that if he went home a physician would have
to go to the trouble of calling on him there and arranging private
care for him. He went to bed in Ward Two.
This is something I'd love to say to people engaged in private healthcare.
I know Abbenay is a forbidding place at first. One feels lost,
isolated, lacking the simple solidarity the little towns have. I know
interesting people, whom you might like to meet. And people who might
be useful to you. I know Sabul; I have some notion of what you may
have come up against, with him, and with the whole Institute. They
play dominance games there. It takes some experience to know how to
outplay them.
He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the
breaking of promises, the incoherence of time. He broke. He began to
cry, trying to hide his face in the shelter of his arms, for he could
not find the strength to turn over. One of the old men, the sick old
men, came and sat on the side of the cot and patted his shoulder.
“It’s all right, brother. It’ll be all right, little brother,” he
muttered. Shevek heard him and felt his touch, but took no comfort in
it. Even from the brother there is no comfort in the bad hour, in the
dark at the foot of the wall.