boyhood; over the dry plains of the Dust; over the roofs of Abbenay, with Takver watching it beside him.
But it had not been this Moon.
The shadows moved about him, but he sat unmoving as Anarres rose above the alien hills, at her full, mottled dun and bluish-white, lambent. The light of his world filled his empty hands.
THE westering sun shining in on his face woke Shevek as the dirigible, clearing the last high pass of the Ne Theras, turned due south. He had slept most of the day, the third of the long journey. The night of the farewell party was half a world behind him. He yawned and rubbed his eyes and shook his head, trying to shake the deep rumble of the dirigible engine out of his ears, and then came wide awake, realizing that the journey was nearly over, that they must be coming close to Abbenay. He pressed his face to the dusty window, and sure enough, down there between the two low rusty ridges was a great walled field, the Port. He gazed eagerly, trying to see if there was a spaceship on the pad. Despicable as Urras was, still it was another world; he wanted to see a ship from another world, a voyager across the dry and terrible abyss, a thing made by alien hands. But there was no ship in the Port.
The freighters from Urras came in only eight times a year, and stayed just long enough to load and unload. They were not welcome visitors. Indeed they were, to some Anarresti, a perpetually renewed humiliation.
They brought fossil oils and petroleum products, certain delicate machine parts and electronic components that Anarresti manufacturing was not geared to supply, and often a new strain of fruit tree or grain for testing. They took back to Urras a full load of mercury, copper, aluminum, uranium, tin, and gold. It was, for them, a very good bargain. The division of their cargoes eight times a year was the most prestigious function of the Urrasti Council of World Governments and the major event of the Urrasti world stock market. In fact, the Free World of Anarres was a mining colony of Urras.
The fact galled. Every generation, every year, in the PDC debates of Abbenay, fierce protests were made: “Why do we continue these profiteering business transactions with warmaking propertarians?” And cooler heads always gave the same answer: “It would cost the Urrasti more to dig the ores themselves; therefore they don’t invade us. But if we broke the trade agreement, they would use force.” It is hard, however, for people who have never paid money for anything to understand the psychology of cost, the argument of the marketplace. Seven generations of peace had not brought trust.
Therefore the work-posting called Defense never had to call for volunteers. Most Defense work was so boring that it was not called work in Pravic, which used the same word for work and play, but kleggich, drudgery. Defense workers manned the twelve old interplanetary ships, keeping them repaired and in orbit as a guard network; maintained radar and radio-telescopic scans in lonesome places; did dull duty at the Port. And yet they always had a waiting list. However pragmatic the morality a young Anarresti absorbed, yet life overflowed in him, demanding altruism, self-sacrifice, scope for the absolute gesture. Loneliness, watchfulness, danger, spaceships: they offered the lure of romance. It was pure romance that kept Shevek flattening his nose against the window until the vacant Port had dropped away behind the dirigible, and that left him disappointed because he had not seen a grubby ore freighter on the pad.
He yawned again, and stretched, and then looked out, ahead, to see what was to be seen. The dirigible was clearing the last low ridge of the Ne Theras. Before it, stretching out southward from the mountains’ arms, brilliant in the afternoon sunlight, lay a great sloping bay of green.
He looked at it with wonder, as his ancestors, six thousand years ago, had looked at it.
In the Third Millennium on Urras the astronomer-priests of Serdonou and Dhun had watched the seasons change the tawny brightness of the Otherworld, and had given mystical names to the plains and ranges and sun-reflecting seas. One region that grew green before all others in the lunar new year they called Ans Hos, the Garden of Mind: the Eden of Anarres.
In later millennia telescopes had proved them to be quite correct. Ans Hos was indeed the most favored spot on