there signed him out of the commons where he usually ate, as the system was coordinated citywide by a computer. It was one of the highly mechanized “homeostatic processes” beloved by the early Settlers, which persisted only in Abbenay. Like the less elaborate arrangements used elsewhere, it never quite worked out; there were shortages, surpluses, and frustrations, but not major ones. Sign-outs at Pekesh commons were infrequent, as the kitchen was the best known in Abbenay, having a tradition of great cooks. An opening appeared at last, and they went in. Two young people whom Bedap knew slightly as dom neighbors of Shevek’s and Takver’s joined them at table. Otherwise they were let alone—left alone. Which? It did not seem to matter. They had a good dinner, a good time talking. But every now and then Bedap felt that around them there was a circle of silence.
“I don’t know what the Urrasti will think up next,” he said, and though he was speaking lightly he found himself, to his annoyance, lowering his voice. “They’ve asked to come here, and asked Shev to come there; what will the next move be?”
“I didn’t know they’d actually asked Shev to go there,” Takver said with a half frown.
“Yes, you did,” Shevek said. “When they told me that they’d given me the prize, you know, the Seo Oen, they asked if I couldn’t come, remember? To get the money that goes with it!” Shevek smiled, luminous. If there was a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he had alway been alone.
“That’s right. I did know that. It just didn’t register as an actual possibility. You’d been talking for decads about suggesting in PDC that somebody might go to Urras, just to shock them.”
“That’s what we finally did, this afternoon. Dap made me say it.”
“Were they shocked?”
“Hair on end, eyes bulging—”
Takver giggled. Pilun sat in a high chair next to Shevek, exercising her teeth on a piece of holum bread and her voice in song. “O mathery bathery,” she proclaimed, “Abbery abbery babber dab!” Shevek, versatile, replied in the same vein. Adult conversation proceeded without intensity and with interruptions. Bedap did not mind, he had learned long ago that you took Shevek with complications or not at all. The most silent one of them all was Sadik.
Bedap stayed on with them for an hour after dinner in the pleasant, spacious common rooms of the domicile, and when he got up to go offered to accompany Sadik to her school dormitory, which was on his way. At this something happened, one of those events or signals obscure to those outside a family; all he knew was that Shevek, with no fuss or discussion, was coming along. Takver had to go feed Pilun, who was getting louder and louder. She kissed Bedap, and he and Shevek set off with Sadik, talking. They talked hard, and walked right past the learning center. They turned back. Sadik had stopped before the dormitory entrance. She stood motionless, erect and slight, her face still, in the weak light of the street lamp. Shevek stood equally still for a moment, then went to her. “What is wrong, Sadik?”
The child said, “Shevek, may I stay in the room tonight?”
“Of course. But what’s wrong?”
Sadik’s delicate, long face quivered and seemed to fragment. “They don’t like me, in the dormitory,” she said, her voice becoming shrill with tension, but even softer than before.
“They don’t like you? What do you mean?”
They did not touch each other yet. She answered him with desperate courage. “Because they don’t like—they don’t like the Syndicate, and Bedap, and—and you. They call— The big sister in the dorm room, she said you—we were all tr— She said we were traitors,” and saying the word the child jerked as if she had been shot, and Shevek caught her and held her. She held to him with all her strength, weeping in great gasping sobs. She was too old, too tall for him to pick up. He stood holding her, stroking her hair. He looked over her dark head at Bedap. His own eyes were full of tears. He said, “It’s all right, Dap. Go on.”
There was nothing for Bedap to do but leave them there, the man and the child, in that one intimacy which he could not share, the hardest and deepest, the intimacy of pain. It gave him no sense of relief or escape to go; rather he felt useless, diminished. “I am thirty-nine years