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that either. He wasn't quite sure he was ready to publish. There was something not quite right, something
that needed a little refining. As he had been working ten years on the theory, it wouldn't hurt to take a
little longer, to get it polished perfectly smooth.
The little something not quite right kept looking wronger. A little flaw in the reasoning. A big flaw. A
crack right through the foundations& The night before he left Anarres he had burned every paper he had
on the General Theory. He had come to Urras with nothing. For half a year he had, in their terms, been
bluffing them.
Or had he been bluffing himself?
It was quite possible that a general theory of temporality was an illusory goal. It was also possible
that, though Sequency and Simultaneity might someday be unified in a general theory, he was not the man
to do the job. He had been trying for ten years and had not done it. Mathematicians and physicists,
athletes of intellect, do their great work young. It was more than possible probable that he was burnt
out, finished.
He was perfectly aware that he had had the same low moods and intimations of failure in the periods
just before his moments of highest creativity. He found himself trying to encourage himself with that fact,
and was furious at his own naivete. To interpret temporal order as causal order was a pretty stupid thing
for a chronosophist to do. Was he senile already? He had better simply get to work on the small but
practical task of refining the concept of interval. It might be useful to someone else.
But even in that, even in talking with other physicists about it, he felt that he was holding something
back. And they knew he was.
He was sick of holding back, sick of not talking, not talking about the revolution, not talking about
physics, not talking about anything.
He crossed the campus on his way to a lecture. The birds were singing in the newly leafed trees. He
had not heard them sing all winter, but now they were at it, pouring it out, the sweet tunes. Ree-dee, they
sang, tee-dee. This is my propertee-tee, this is my territoree-ree-ree, it belongs to mee, mee.
Shevek stood still for a minute under the trees, listening.
Then he turned off the path, crossed the campus in a different direction, towards the station, and
caught a morning train to Nio Esseia. There had to be a door open somewhere on this damned planet!
He thought, as he sat in the train, of trying to get out of A-Io: of going to Benbili, maybe. But he did
not take the thought seriously. He would have to ride on a ship or airplane, he would be traced and
stopped. The only place where he could get out of sight of his benevolent and protective hosts was in
their own big city, under their noses.
It was not an escape. Even if he did get out of the country, he would still be locked in, locked in
Urras. You couldn't call that escape, whatever the archists, with their mystique of national boundaries,
might call it. But he suddenly felt cheerful, as he had not for days, when he thought that his benevolent
and protective hosts might think, for a moment, that he had escaped.
It was the first really warm day of spring. The fields were green, and flashed with water. On the
pasture lands each stock beast was accompanied by her young. The infant sheep were particularly
charming, bouncing like white elastic balls, their tails going round and round. In a pen by himself the herd
sire, ram or bull or stallion, heavy-necked, stood potent as a thundercloud, charged with generation.
Gulls swept over brimming ponds, white over blue, and white clouds brightened the pale blue sky. The
branches of orchard trees were tipped with red, and a few blossoms were open, rose and white.
Watching from the train window Shevek found his restless and rebellious mood ready to defy even the
day's beauty. It was an unjust beauty. What had the Urrasti done to deserve it? Why was it given to
them, so lavishly, so graciously, and so little, so very little, to his own people?
I'm thinking like an Urrasti, he said to himself. Like a damned propertarian. As if deserving meant
anything. As if one could earn beauty, or life! He tried to think of nothing at all, to let himself be borne
forward and to watch the sunlight in the gentle sky and the little sheep bouncing in the fields of spring.
Nio Esseia, a city of five million souls, lifted its delicate glittering towers across the green marshes of
the Estuary as if it were built of mist and sunlight. As the train swung in smoothly on a long viaduct the city
rose up taller, brighter, solider, until suddenly it enclosed the tram entirely in the roaring darkness of an
underground approach, twenty tracks together, and then released it and its passengers into the enormous,
brilliant spaces of the Central Station, under the central dome of ivory and azure, said to be the largest
dome ever raised on any world by the hand of man.
Shevek wandered across acres of polished marble under that immense ethereal vault, and came at
last to the long array of doors through which crowds of people came and went constantly, all purposeful,
all separate. They all looked, to him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of
Urrasti, and wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they always had
to worry about making more, lest they die poor? Was it guilt, because no matter how little money they
had, there was always somebody who had less? Whatever the cause, it gave all the faces a certain
sameness, and he felt very much alone among them. In escaping his guides and guards he had not
considered what it might be like to be on one's own in a society where men did not trust one another,
where the basic moral assumption was not mutual aid, but mutual aggression. He was a little frightened.
He had vaguely imagined wandering about the city and getting into conversation with people,
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