steel, glass, electric light. No faces.
“This is Nio Esseia, Dr. Shevek. But it was decided it would be better to keep you out of the city crowds just at first. We’re going straight on to the University.”
There were five men with him in the dark, softly padded body of the car. They pointed out landmarks, but in the fog he could not tell which great, vague, fleeting building was the High Court and which the National Museum, which the Directorate and which the Senate. They crossed a river or estuary, the million lights of Nio Esseia, fog-diffused, trembled on dark water, behind them. The road darkened, the fog thickened, the driver slowed the vehicle’s pace. Its lights shone on the mist ahead as if on a wall that kept retreating before them. Shevek sat leaning forward a little, gazing out. His eyes were not focused, nor was his mind, but he looked aloof and grave, and the other men talked quietly, respecting his silence.
What was the thicker darkness that flowed along endlessly by the road? Trees? Could they have been driving, ever since they left the city, among trees? The Iotic word came into his mind: “forest.” They would not come out suddenly into the desert. The trees went on and on, on the next hillside and the next and the next, standing in the sweet chill of the fog, endless, a forest all over the world, a still striving interplay of lives, a dark movement of leaves in the night. Then as Shevek sat marveling, as the car came up out of the fog of the river valley into clearer air, there looked at him from the darkness under the roadside foliage, for one instant, a face.
It was not like any human face. It was as long as his arm, and ghastly white. Breath jetted in vapor from what must be nostrils, and terrible, unmistakable, there was an eye. A large, dark eye, mournful, perhaps cynical? gone in the flash of the car’s lights.
“What was that?”
“Donkey, wasn’t it?”
“An animal?”
“Yes, an animal. By God, that’s right! You have no large animals on Anarres, have you?”
“A donkey’s a kind of horse,” said another of the men, and another, in a firm, elderly voice, “That was a horse. Donkeys don’t come that size.” They wanted to talk with him, but Shevek was not listening again. He was thinking of Takver. He wondered what that deep, dry, dark gaze out of the darkness would have meant to Takver. She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary. Takver would have known how to look back at that eye in the darkness under the trees.
“There’s Ieu Eun ahead. There’s quite a crowd waiting to meet you, Dr. Shevek; the President, and several Directors, and the Chancellor, of course, all kinds of bigwigs. But if you’re tired we’ll get the amenities over with as soon as possible.”
The amenities lasted several hours. He never could remember them clearly afterward. He was propelled from the small dark box of the car into a huge bright box full of people—hundreds of people, under a golden ceiling hung with crystal lights. He was introduced to all the people. They were all shorter than he was, and bald. The few women there were bald even on their heads; he realized at last that they must shave off all their hair, the very fine, soft, short body hair of his race, and the head hair as well. But they replaced it with marvelous clothing, gorgeous in cut and color, the women in full gowns that swept the floor, their breasts bare, their waists and necks and heads adorned with jewelry and lace and gauze, the men in trousers and coats or tunics of red, blue, violet, gold, green, with slashed sleeves and cascades of lace, or long gowns of crimson or dark green or black that parted at the knee to show the white stockings, silver-gartered. Another Iotic word floated into Shevek’s head, one he had never had a referent for, though he liked the sound of it: “splendor.” These people had splendor. Speeches were made. The President of the Senate of the Nation of A-Io, a man with strange, cold eyes, proposed a toast: “To the new era of brotherhood between the Twin Planets, and to the harbinger of that new era, our distinguished and most welcome