see them and keep them and feed them as long as they’d stay. But they never would stay long. But then people would just pick up and leave town, kids usually, some of them just hated farm work, and they’d just quit their posting and leave. People do that everywhere, all the time. They move on, looking for something better. You just don’t call it refusing posting!”
“Why not?”
“What are you getting at?” Takver grumbled, retiring further under the blanket.
“Well, this. That we’re ashamed to say we’ve refused a posting. That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate—we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoizing. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice. You don’t believe me, Tak, but try, just try stepping over the line, just in imagination, and see how you feel. You realize then what Tirin is, and why he’s a wreck, a lost soul. He is a criminal! We have created crime, just as the propertarians did. We force a man outside the sphere of our approval, and then condemn him for it. We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behavior, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking. Tir never did that. I knew him since we were ten years old. He never did it, he never could build walls. He was a natural rebel. He was a natural Odonian—a real one! He was a free man, and the rest of us, his brothers, drove him insane in punishment for his first free act.”
“I don’t think,” Takver said, muffled in the bed, and defensively, “that Tir was a very strong person.”
“No, he was extremely vulnerable.”
There was a long silence.
“No wonder he haunts you,” she said. “His play. Your book.”
“But I’m luckier. A scientist can pretend that his work isn’t himself, it’s merely the impersonal truth. An artist can’t hide behind the truth. He can’t hide anywhere.”
Takver watched him from the corner of her eye for some time, then turned over and sat up, pulling the blanket up around her shoulders. “Brr! It’s cold. . . . I was wrong, wasn’t I, about the book. About letting Sabul cut it up and put his name on it. It seemed right. It seemed like setting the work before the workman, pride before vanity, community before ego, all that. But it wasn’t really that at all, was it? It was a capitulation. A surrender to Sabul’s authoritarianism.”
“I don’t know. It did get the thing printed.”
“The right end, but the wrong means! I thought about it for a long time, at Rolny, Shev. I’ll tell you what was wrong. I was pregnant. Pregnant women have no ethics. Only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse. To hell with the book, and the partnership, and the truth, if they threaten the precious fetus! It’s a racial preservation drive, but it can work right against community; it’s biological, not social. A man can be grateful he never gets into the grip of it. But he’d better realize than a woman can, and watch out for it. I think that’s why the old archisms used women as property. Why did the women let them? Because they were pregnant all the time—because they were already possessed, enslaved!”
“All right, maybe, but our society, here, is a true community wherever it truly embodies Odo’s ideas. It was a woman who made the Promise! What are you doing—indulging guilt feelings? Wallowing?” The word he used was not “wallowing,” there being no animals on Anarres to make wallows; it was a compound, meaning literally “coating continually and thickly with excrement.” The flexibility and precision of Pravic lent itself to the creation of vivid metaphors quite unforeseen by its inventors.
“Well, no. It was lovely, having Sadik! But I was wrong about the book.”
“We were both wrong. We always go wrong together. You don’t really think you made up my mind for me?”
“In that case I think I did.”
“No. The fact is, neither of us made up our mind. Neither of us chose. We let Sabul choose for us. Our own, internalized Sabul—convention, moralism, fear of social ostracism, fear of being different, fear of being free! Well, never again. I learn slowly, but I learn.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Takver, a thrill of agreeable excitement in her voice.
“Go to Abbenay with you and start a syndicate, a printing syndicate. Print the