But he did not know how to break down the wall. And if he did, where could he go? The panic closed in on him tighter. To whom could he turn? He was surrounded on all sides by the smiles of the rich.

“I’d like to talk with you, Efor.”

“Yes sir. Excuse me, sir. I make room set this down here.”

The servant handled the heavy tray deftly, flicked off dish covers, poured out the bitter chocolate so it rose frothing to the cup’s rim without spill or splatter. He clearly enjoyed the breakfast ritual and his adeptness at it, and as clearly wanted no unusual interruptions in it. He often spoke quite clear Iotic, but now as soon as Shevek said he wanted a talk Efor had slid into the staccato of the city dialect. Shevek had learned to follow it a little; the shift of sound values was consistent once you caught it, but the apocopations left him groping. Half the words were left out. It was like a code, he thought: as if the “Nioti,” as they called themselves, did not want to be understood by outsiders.

The manservant stood awaiting Shevek’s pleasure. He knew—he had learned Shevek’s idiosyncrasies within the first week—that Shevek did not want him to hold a chair, or to wait on him while he ate. His erect attentive pose was enough to wither any hope of informality.

“Will you sit down, Efor?”

“If you please sir,” the man replied. He moved a chair half an inch, but did not sit down in it.

“This is what I want to talk about. You know I don’t like to give you orders.”

“Try manage things like you want sir without troubling for orders.”

“You do—I don’t mean that. You know, in my country nobody gives any orders.”

“So I hear sir.”

“Well, I want to know you as my equal, my brother. You are the only one I know here who is not rich—not one of the owners. I want very much to talk with you, I want to know about your life—”

He stopped in despair, seeing the contempt on Efor’s lined face. He had made all the mistakes possible. Efor took him for a patronizing, prying fool.

He dropped his hands to the table in a gesture of hopelessness and said, “Oh, hell, I am sorry, Efor! I cannot say what I mean. Please ignore it.”

“Just as you say sir.” Efor withdrew.

That was the end of that. The “unpropertied classes” remained as remote from him as when he had read about them in history at Northsetting Regional Institute.

Meanwhile, he had promised to spend a week with the Oiies, between winter and spring terms.

Oiie had invited him to dinner several times since his first visit, always rather stiffly, as if he were carrying out a duty of hospitality, or perhaps a governmental order. In his own house, however, though never wholly off his guard with Shevek, he was genuinely friendly. By the second visit his two sons had decided that Shevek was an old friend, and their confidence in Shevek’s response obviously puzzled their father. It made him uneasy; he could not really approve of it; but he could not say it was unjustified. Shevek behaved to them like an old friend, like an elder brother. They admired him, and the younger, Ini, came to love him passionately. Shevek was kind, serious, honest, and told very good stories about the Moon; but there was more to it than that. He represented something to the child that Ini could not describe. Even much later in his life, which was profoundly and obscurely influenced by that childhood fascination, Ini found no words for it, only words that held an echo of it: the word voyager, the word exile.