quiet. I feel emotional.” Shevek raised his cup of fruit juice. “I want to say— What I want to say is this. I’m glad Sadik was born now. In a hard year, in a hard time, when we need our brotherhood. I’m glad she was born now, and here. I’m glad she’s one of us, an Odonian, our daughter and our sister. I’m glad she’s sister to Bedap. That she’s sister to Sabul, even to Sabul! I drink to this hope: that as long as she lives, Sadik will love her sisters and brothers as well, as joyfully, as I do now tonight. And that the rain will fall. . . .”
PDC, the principal users of radio, telephone, and mails, coordinated the means of long-distance communication, just as they did the means of long-distance travel and shipping. There being no “business” on Anarres, in the sense of promoting, advertising, investing, speculating, and so forth, the mail consisted mostly of correspondence among industrial and professional syndicates, their directives and newsletters plus those of the PDC, and a small volume of personal letters. Living in a society where anyone could move whenever and wherever he wanted, an Anarresti tended to look for his friends where he was, not where he had been. Telephones were seldom used within a community; communities weren’t all that big. Even Abbenay kept up the close regional pattern in its “blocks,” the semiautonomous neighborhoods in which you could get to anyone or anything you needed, on foot. Telephone calls thus were mostly long-distance, and were handled by the PDC: personal calls had to be arranged beforehand by mail, or were not conversations but simply messages left at the PDC center. Letters went unsealed, not by law, of course, but by convention. Personal communication at long distance is costly in materials and labor, and since the private and the public economy was the same, there was considerable feeling against unnecessary writing or calling. It was a trivial habit; it smacked of privatism, of egoizing. This was probably why the letters went unsealed: you had no right to ask people to carry a message that they couldn’t read. A letter went on a PDC mail dirigible if you were lucky, and on a produce train if you weren’t. Eventually it got to the mail depot in the town addressed, and there it lay, there being no postmen, until somebody told the addressee that he had a letter and he came to get it.
The individual, however, decided what was and what was not necessary. Shevek and Takver wrote each other regularly, about once a decad. He wrote:
This trip was not bad, three days, a passenger track truck clear through. This is a big levy—three thousand people, they say. The effects of the drought are much worse here. Not the shortages. The food in commons is the same ration as in Abbenay, only here you get boiled gara-greens at both meals every day because they have a local surplus. We too begin to feel we have had a surplus. But it is the climate here that makes misery. This is the Dust. The air is dry and the wind always blowing. There are brief rains, but within an hour after rain the ground loosens and the dust begins to rise. It has rained less than half the annual average this season here. Everyone on the Project gets cracked lips, nosebleed, eye irritations, and coughs. Among the people who live in Red Springs there is a lot of the dust cough. Babies have a specially hard time, you see many with skin and eyes inflamed. I wonder if I would have noticed that half a year ago. One becomes keener with parenthood. The work is just work and everyone
is comradely, but the dry wind wears. Last night I thought of the Ne Theras and in the night the sound of the wind was like the sound of the stream. I will not regret this separation. It has allowed me to see that I had begun to give less, as if I possessed you and you me and there was nothing more to be done. The real fact has nothing to do with ownership. What we do is assert the wholeness of Time. Tell me what Sadik does. I am teaching a class on the free days to some people who asked for it, one girl is a natural mathematician whom I shall recommend to the Institute. Your brother, Shevek.
Takver wrote to him:
I am