old Atro brought him a pile of newspapers. Pae, who was Shevek’s very frequent companion, said nothing to Atro, but when the old man left he told Shevek, “Awful trash, those papers, sir. Amusing, but don’t believe anything you read in them.”
Shevek took up the topmost paper. It was badly printed on coarse paper—the first crudely made artifact he had handled on Urras. In fact it looked like the PDC bulletins and regional reports that served as newspapers on Anarres, but its style was very different from those smudgy, practical, factual publications. It was full of exclamation points and pictures. There was a picture of Shevek in front of the spaceship, with Pae holding his arm and scowling. FIRST MAN FROM THE MOON! said the huge print over the picture. Fascinated, Shevek read on.
His first step on Earth! Urras’ first visitor from the Anarres Settlement in 170 years, Dr. Shevek, was photographed yesterday at his arrival on the regular Moon freighter run at Peier Space Port. The distinguished scientist, winner of the Seo Oen Prize for service to all nations through science, has accepted a professorship at Ieu Eun University, an honor never before accorded to an off-worlder. Asked about his feelings on first viewing Urras, the tall, distinguished physicist replied, “It is a great honor to be invited to your beautiful planet. I hope that a new era of all-Cetian friendship is now beginning, when the Twin Planets will move forward together in brotherhood.”
“But I never said anything!” Shevek protested to Pae.
“Of course not. We didn’t let that lot get near you. That doesn’t cramp a birdseed journalist’s imagination! They’ll report you as saying what they want you to say, no matter what you do say, or don’t.”
Shevek chewed his lip. “Well,” he said at last, “if I had said anything, it would have been like that. But what is ‘all-Cetian’?”
“The Terrans call us ‘Cetians.’ From their word for our sun, I believe. The popular press has picked it up lately, there’s a sort of fad for the word.”
“Then ‘all-Cetian’ means Urras and Anarres together?”
“I suppose so,” Pae said with marked lack of interest.
Shevek went on reading the papers. He read that he was a towering giant of a man, that he was unshaven and possessed a ‘mane,’ whatever that was, of greying hair, that he was thirty-seven, forty-three, and fifty-six; that he had written a great work of physics called (the spelling depended on the paper) Principals of Simultaneity or Principles of Simiultany, that he was a goodwill ambassador from the Odonian government, that he was a vegetarian, and that, like all Anarresti, he did not drink. At this he broke down and laughed till his ribs hurt. “By damn, they do have imagination! Do they think we live on water vapor, like the rockmoss?”
“They mean you don’t drink alcoholic liquors,” said Pae, also laughing. “The one thing everybody knows about Odonians, I suppose, is that you don’t drink alcohol. Is it true, by the way?”
“Some people distill alcohol from fermented holum root, for drinking. They say it gives the unconscious free play, like brainwave training. Most people prefer that, it’s very easy and doesn’t cause a disease. Is that common here?”
“Drinking is. I don’t know about this disease. What’s it called?”
“Alcoholism, I think.”
“Oh, I see. . . . But what do working people do on Anarres for a bit of jollity, to escape the woes of the world together for a night?”
Shevek looked blank. “Well, we . . . I don’t know. Perhaps our woes are inescapable?”
“Quaint,” Pae said, and smiled disarmingly.
Shevek pursued his reading. One of the journals was in a language he did not know, and one in a different alphabet altogether. The one was from Thu, Pae explained, and the other from Benbili, a nation in the western hemisphere. The paper from Thu was well printed and sober in format; Pae explained that it was a government publication. “Here in A-Io, you see, educated people get their news from the telefax, and radio and television, and the weekly reviews. These papers are read by the lower classes almost exclusively—written by semiliterates for semiliterates, as you can see. We have complete freedom of the press in A-Io, which inevitably means we get a lot of trash. The Thuvian paper is much better written, but it reports only those facts which the Thuvian Central Presidium wants reported. Censorship is absolute, in Thu. The state is all, and all for the state. Hardly the place for an