“Not yet”
“They send down the breakdown rig from Lonesome within a day or so.”
“That’s the next settlement?”
“Right Seventeen hundred kilometers from Sedep Mines to Lonesome. Longest run between towns on Anarres. I’ve been doing it for eleven years.”
“Not tired of it?”
“No. Like to run a job by myself.”
The passenger nodded agreement.
“And it’s steady. I like routine; you can think. Fifteen days on the run, fifteen off with the partner in New Hope. Year in, year out; drought, famine, whatever. Nothing changes, it’s always drought down here. I like the run. Get the water out, will you? Cooler’s back underneath the locker.”
They each had a long swig from the bottle. The water had a flat, alkaline taste, but was cool. “Ah, that’s good!” the passenger said gratefully. He put the bottle away and, returning to his seat in the front of the cab, stretched, bracing his hands against the roof. “You’re a partnered man, then,” he said. There was a simplicity in the way he said it that the driver liked, and he answered, “Eighteen years.”
“Just starting.”
“By damn, I agree with that! Now that’s what some don’t see. But the way I see it, if you copulate around enough in your teens, that’s when you get the most out of it, and also you find out that it’s all pretty much the same damn thing. And a good thing, too! But still, what’s different isn’t the copulating; it’s the other person. And eighteen years is just a start, all right, when it comes to figuring out that difference. At least, if it’s a woman you’re trying to figure out A woman won’t let on to being so puzzled by a man, but maybe they bluff… Anyhow, that’s the pleasure of it The puzzles and the bluffs and the rest of it. The variety. Variety doesn’t come with just moving around. I was all over Anarrea, young. Drove and loaded in every Division. Must have known a hundred girls in different towns. It got boring. I came back here, and I do this run every three decads year in year out through this same desert where you cant tell one sandhill from the next and it’s all the same for three thousand kilos whichever way you look, and go home to the same partner — and I never been bored once. It isn’t changing around from place to place that keeps you lively. It’s getting time on your side. Working with it, not against it.”
“That’s it,” said the passenger.
“Where’s the partner?”
“In Northeast. Four years now.”
“That’s too long,” the driver said. “You should have been posted together.”
“Not where I was.”
“Where’s that?”
“Elbow, and then Grand Valley.”
“I heard about Grand Valley.” He now looked at the passenger with the respect due a survivor. He saw the dry look of the man’s tanned skin, a kind of weathering to the bone, which he had seen in others who had come through the famine years in the Dust “We shouldn’t have tried to keep those mills running!”
“We needed the phosphates.”
“But they say, when the provisions train was stopped in Portal, they kept the mills going, and people died of hunger on the job. Just went a little out of the way and lay down and died. Was it like that?”
The man nodded. He said nothing. The driver pressed no further, but said after a while, “I wondered what I’d do if my train ever got mobbed.”
“It never did?”
“No. See, I don’t carry foodstuffs; one truckload, at most, for Upper Sedep. This is an ores run. But if I got on a provisions run, and they stopped me, what would I do? Run ’em down and get the food to where it ought to go? But hell, you going to run down kids, old men? They’re doing wrong but you going to kill em for it? I don’t knowl”
The straight shining rails ran under the wheels. Clouds in the west laid great shivering mirages on the plain, the shadows of dreams of lakes gone dry ten million years ago.
“A syndic, fellow I’ve known for years, he did just that, north of here, in ’66. They tried to take a grain truck off his train. He backed the train, killed a couple of them before they cleared the track, they were like worms in rotten fish, thick, he said. He said, there’s eight hundred people waiting for that grain truck, and how many of them might die if they don’t get it? More than a couple, a lot more. So it looks like he was right. But by damn! I can’t add up figures like that. I don’t know if it’s right to count people like you count numbers. But then, what do you do? Which ones do you kill?”
The second year I was in Elbow, I was worklister, the mill syndicate cut rations. People doing six hours in the plant got full rations — just barely enough for that kind of work. People on half time got three-quarter rations. If they were sick or too weak to work, they got half. On half rations you couldn’t get well. You couldn’t get back to work. You might stay alive. I was supposed to put people on half rations, people that were already sick. I was working full time, eight, ten hours sometimes, desk work, so I got full rations: I earned them, I earned them by making lists of who should starve,” The man’s light eyes looked ahead into the dry light. “Like you said, I was to count people.”
“You quit?”
“Yes, I quit. Went to Grand Valley. But somebody else took over the lists at the mills in Elbow. There’s always somebody willing to make lists.”
“Now that’s wrong,” the driver said, scowling into the glare. He had a bald brown face and scalp, no hair left between cheeks and occiput, though he wasn’t past his middle forties. It was a strong, hard, and innocent face. “That’s dead wrong. They should have shut the mills down. You can’t ask a man to do that. Aren’t we Odonians? A man can lose his temper, all right. That’s what the people who mobbed trains did. They were hungry, the kids were hungry, been hungry too long, there’s food coming through and its not for you, you lose your temper and go for it. Same thing with the friend, those people were taking apart the tram he was in charge of, he lost his temper and put it in reverse. He didn’t count any noses. Not then! Later, maybe. Because he was sick when he saw what he’d done. But what they had you doing, saying this one lives and that one dies — that’s not a job a person has a right to do, or ask anybody else to do.”
“It’s been a bad time, brother,” the passenger said gently, watching the glaring plain where the shadows of water wavered and drifted with the wind.
The old cargo dirigible wallowed over the mountains and moored in at the airport on Kidney Mountain. Three passengers got off there. Just as the last of them touched ground, the ground picked itself up and bucked. “Earthquake,” he remarked; he was a local coining home. “Damn, look at that dustl Someday well come down here and there won’t be any mountain.”
Two of the passengers chose to wait till the trucks were loaded and ride with them. Shevek chose to walk, since the local said that Chakar was only about six kilometers down the mountain.
The road went in a series of long curves with a short rise at the end of each. The rising slopes to the left of the road and the falling slopes to the right were thick with scrub holum; lines of tall tree holum, spaced just as if they had been planted, followed veins of ground water along the mountainsides. At the crest of a rise Shevek saw the clear gold of sunset above the dark and many-folded hills. There was no sign of mankind here except the road itself, going down into shadow. As he started down, the air grum bled a little and he felt a strangeness: no jolt, no tremor, but a displacement, a conviction that things were wrong. He completed the step he had been making, and the ground was there to meet his foot. He went on; the road stayed lying down. He had been in no danger, but he had never in any danger known himself so close to death. Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind. Shevek felt the cold, clean air in his mouth and lungs. He listened. Remote, a mountain torrent thundered somewhere down in the shadows.
He came in the late dusk to Chakar. The sky was dark violet over the black ridges. Street lamps flared
bright and lonely. Housefronts looked sketchy in the artificial light, the wilderness dark behind them. There were many empty lots, many single houses: an old town, a frontier town, isolated, scattered. A woman passing directed Shevek to Domicile Eight: “That way, brother, past the hospital, the end of the street.” The street ran into the dark under the mountainside and ended at the door of a low building. He entered and found a country-town domicile foyer that took him back to his childhood, to the places in Liberty, Drum Mountain, Wide Plains, where he and his father had lived: the dim light, the patched matting; a leaflet describing a local machinists training group, a notice of syndicate meetings, and a flyer for a performance of a play three decads ago, tacked to the announcement board; a framed amateur painting of Odo in prison over the common-room sofa; a homemade harmonium; a list of residents and a notice of hot-water hours at the town baths posted by the door.
Sherat, Takver, No. 3.
He knocked, watching the reflection of the hall light in the dark surface of the door, which did not hang quite true in its frame. A woman said, “Come in!” He opened the door.
The brighter light in the room was behind her. He could not see well enough for a moment to be sure it was Takver. She stood facing him. She reached out, as if to push him away or to take hold of him, an uncertain, unfinished gesture. He took her hand, and then they held each other, they came together and stood holding each other on the unreliable earth.
“Come in,” Takver said, “oh come in, come in.”
Shevek opened his eyes. Farther into the room, which still seemed very bright, he saw the serious, watchful face of a small child.
“Sadik, this is Shevek.”
The child went to Takver, took hold of her leg, and burst into tears.
“But don’t cry, why are you crying, little soul?”
“Why are you?” the child whispered.
“Because I’m happy! Only because I’m happy. Sit on my lap. But Shevek, Shevekl The letter from you only came yesterday. I was going to go by the telephone when I took Sadik home to sleep. You said you’d catt tonight. Not come tonight! Oh, don’t cry, Sadiki, look, I’m not any more, am I?”
“The man cried too.”
“Of course I did.”
Sadik looked at him with mistrustful curiosity. She was four years old. She had a round head, a round face, she was round, dark, furry, soft.
There was no furniture in the room but the two bed platforms. Takver bad sat down on one with Sadik on her lap, Shevek sat down on the other and stretched out his legs. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, and held the knuckles out to show Sadik. “See,” he said, “they’re wet. And the nose dribbles. Do you keep a handkerchief?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“I did, but it got lost in a washhouse.”
“You can share the handkerchief I use,” Sadik said after a pause.
“He doesn’t know where it is,” said Takver.
Sadik got off her mother’s lap and fetched a handkerchief from a drawer in the closet. She gave it to Takver, who passed it across to Shevek. “It’s clean,” Takver said, with her large smile. Sadik watched closely while Shevek wiped his nose.
“Was there an earthquake here a little while ago?” he asked.
“It shakes all the time, you really stop noticing,” Takver said, but Sadik, delighted to dispense information, said in her high but husky voice, “Yes, there was a big one before dinner. When there’s an earthquake the windows go gliggle and the floor waves, and you ought to go into the doorway or outside.”
Shevek looked at Takver; she returned the look. She had aged more than four years. She had never had very good teeth, and now had lost two, just back of the upper eye-teeth, so that the gaps showed when she smiled. Her skin i no longer had the fine taut surface of youth, and her hair, pulled back neatly, was dull.
Shevek saw clearly that Takver had lost her young grace, and looked a plain, tired woman near the middle of her life. He saw this more clearly than anyone else could have seen it. He saw everything about Takver in a way that no one else could have seen it, from the standpoint of years of intimacy and years of longing. He saw her as she was.
Their eyes met.
“How — how’s it been going here?” he asked, reddening all at once and obviously speaking at random. She felt the palpable wave, the outrush of his desire. She also flushed slightly, and smiled. She said in her husky voice, “Oh, same as when we talked on the phone.”
“That was six decads ago!”
“Things go along pretty much the same here.
“It’s very beautiful here — the hills.” He saw in Takver’s eyes the darkness of the mountain valleys. The acuteness of his sexual desire grew abruptly, so that he was dizzy for a moment, then he got over the crisis temporarily and tried to command his erection to subside. “Do you think you’ll want to stay here?” he said.
“I don’t care,” she said, in her strange, dark, husky voice.
“Your nose is still dribbling,” Sadik remarked, keenly, but without emotional bias.
“Be glad that’s all,” Shevek said. Takver said, “Hush, Sadik, don’t egoize!” Both the adults laughed. Sadik continued to study Shevek.
“I do like the town, Shev. The people are nice — all characters. But the work isn’t much. It’s just lab work in the hospital. The shortage of technicians is just about over, I could leave soon without leaving them in the lurch. I’d like to go back to Abbenay, if you were thinking of that. Have you got a reposting?”
“Didn’t ask for one and haven’t checked. I’ve been on the road for a decad.”
“What were you doing on the road?”
“Traveling on it, Sadik.”
“He was coming from half across the world, from the south, from the deserts, to come to us,” Takver said. The child smiled, settled herself more comfortably on her lap, and yawned.
“Have you eaten, Shev? Are you worn out? I must get this child to bed, we were just thinking of leaving when you knocked.”
“She sleeps in the dormitory already?”
“Since the beginning of this quarter,”
“I was four already,” Sadik stated.
“You say, I am four already,” said Takver, dumping her off gently in order to get her coat from the closet Sadik stood up, in profile to Shevek; she was extremely conscious of him, and directed her remarks towards him. “But I was four, now I’m more than four.”
“A temporalist, like the father!”
“You can’t be four and more than four at the same time, can you?” the child asked, sensing approbation, and now speaking directly to Shevek.
“Oh, yes, easily. And you can be four and nearly five at the same time, too.” Sitting on the low platform, he could hold his head on a level with the child’s so that she did not have to look up at him. “But I’d forgotten that you were nearly five, you see. When I last saw you you were hardly more than nothing.”
“Really?” Her tone was indubitably flirtatious.
“Yes. You were about so long.” He held his hands not very far apart.
“Could I talk yet?”
“You said waa, and a few other things.”
“Did I wake up everybody in the dom like Cheben’s baby?” she inquired, with a broad, gleeful smile.
“Of course.”
“When did I learn how to really talk?”
“At about one half year old,” said Takver, “and you have never shut up since. Where’s the hat. Sadikiki?”
“At school. I hate the hat I wear!” she informed Shevek.
They walked the child through the windy streets to the learning-center dormitory and took her into the lobby. It was a little, shabby place too, but brightened by children’s paintings, several fine brass model engines, and a litter of toy houses and painted wooden people. Sadik kissed her mother good night, then turned to Shevek and put up her arms; he stooped to her; she kissed him matter-of-factly but firmly, and said, “Good night!” She went off with the nig
ht attendant, yawning. They heard her voice, the attendant’s mild hushing.
“She’s beautiful, Takver. Beautiful, intelligent, sturdy.”
“She’s spoiled, I’m afraid.”
“No, no. You’ve done well, fantastically well — in such a time—”
“It hasn’t been so bad here, not the way it was in the south,” she said, looking up into his face as they left the dormitory. “Children were fed, here. Not very well, but enough. A. community here can grow food. If nothing else there’s the scrub holum. You can gather wild holum seeds and pound them for meal. Nobody starved here. But I did spoil Sadik. I nursed her till she was three, of course, why not when there was nothing good to wean her to! But they disapproved, at the research station at Rolny. They wanted me to put her in the nursery there full time. They said I was being propertarian about the child and not contributing full strength to the social effort in the crisis. They were right, really. But they were so righteous. None of them understood about being lonely. They were all groupers, no characters. It was the women who nagged me about nursing. Real body profiteers. I stuck it out there because the food was good — trying out the algaes to see if they were palatable, sometimes you got quite a lot over standard rations, even if it did taste like glue — until they could replace me with somebody who fitted in better. Then I went to Fresh Start for about ten decads. That was whiter, two years ago, that long time the mail didn’t get through, when things were so bad where you were. At Fresh Start I saw this posting listed, and came here. Sadik stayed with me in the dom till this autumn. I still miss her. The room’s so silent.”
“Isn’t there a roommate?”
“Sherut, she’s very nice, but she works night shift at the hospital. It was time Sadik went, it’s good for her living with the other children. She was getting shy. She was very good about going there, very stoical. Little children are stoical. They cry over bumps, but they take the big things as they come, they don’t whine like so many adults.”
They walked along side by side. The autumn stars had come out, incredible in number and brilliance, twinkling and almost blinking because of the dust stirred up by the earthquake and the wind, so that the whole sky seemed to tremble, a shaking of diamond chips, a scintillation of sunlight on a black sea. Under that uneasy splendor the hills were dark and solid, the roofs hard-edged, the light of the street lamps mild.
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