guest, Dr. Shevek of Anarres!” The Chancellor of the University talked to him charmingly, the First Director of the nation talked to him seriously, he was introduced to ambassadors, astronauts, physicists, politicians, dozens of people, all of whom had long titles and honorifics both before and after their names, and they talked to him, and he answered them, but he had no memory later of what anyone had said, least of all himself. Very late at night he found himself with a small group of men walking in the warm rain across a large park or square. There was the springy feeling of live grass underfoot; he recognized it from having walked in the Triangle Park in Abbenay. That vivid memory and the cool vast touch of the night wind awakened him. His soul came out of hiding.
His escorts took him into a building and to a room which, they explained, was “his.”
It was large, about ten meters long, and evidently a common room, as there were no divisions or sleeping platforms; the three men still with him must be his roommates. It was a very beautiful common room, with one whole wall a series of windows, each divided by a slender column that rose treelike to form a double arch at the top. The floor was carpeted with crimson, and at the far end of the room a fire burned in an open hearth. Shevek crossed the room and stood in front of the fire. He had never seen wood burned for warmth, but he was beyond wonder. He held out his hands to the pleasant heat, and sat down on a seat of polished marble by the hearth.
The youngest of the men who had come with him sat down across the hearth from him. The other two were still talking. They were talking physics, but Shevek did not try to follow what they said. The young man spoke quietly. “I wonder how you must feel, Dr. Shevek.”
Shevek stretched out his legs and leaned forward to catch the warmth of the fire on his face. “I feel heavy.”
“Heavy?”
“Perhaps the gravity. Or I am tired.”
He looked at the other man, but through the hearth glow the face was not clear, only the glint of a gold chain and the deep jewel red of the robe.
“I don’t know your name.”
“Saio Pae.”
“Oh, Pae, yes, I know your articles on Paradox.”
He spoke heavily, dreamily.
“There’ll be a bar here, Senior Faculty rooms always have a liquor cabinet. Would you care for something to drink?”
“Water, yes.”
The young man reappeared with a glass of water as the other two came to join them at the hearth. Shevek drank off the water thirstily and sat looking down at the glass in his hand, a fragile, finely shaped piece that caught the gleam of the fire on its rim of gold. He was aware of the three men, of their attitudes as they sat or stood near him, protective, respectful, proprietary.
He looked up at them, one face after the other. They all looked at him, expectant. “Well, you have me,” he said. He smiled. “You have your anarchist. What are you going to do with him?”
IN a square window in a white wall is the clear, bare sky. In the center of the sky is the sun.
There are eleven babies in the room, most of them cooped up in large, padded pen-cots in pairs or trios, and settling down, with commotion and elocution, into their naps. The two eldest remain at large, a fat active one dismembering a pegboard and a knobby one sitting in the square of yellow sunlight from the window, staring up the sunbeam with an earnest and stupid expression.
In the anteroom the matron, a one-eyed woman with grey hair, confers with a tall, sad-looking man of thirty. “The mother’s been posted to Abbenay,” the man says. “She wants him to stay here.”
“Shall we take him into the nursery full-time, then, Palat?”
“Yes. I’ll be moving back into a dorm.”
“Don’t worry, he knows us all here! But surely Divlab will send you along after Rulag soon? Since you’re partners, and both engineers?”
“Yes, but she’s . . . It’s the Central Institute of Engineering that wants her, see. I’m not that good. Rulag has a great work to do.”
The matron nodded, and sighed. “Even so—!” she said with energy, and did not say anything else.
The father’s gaze was on the knobby infant, who had not noticed his presence in the anteroom, being preoccupied with light. The fat