“What’s more romantic than your coming here, all alone, without a coin in your pocket, to plead for your people?”

“And to be spoiled with luxuries while I am here.”

“Luxuries? In university rooms? Good, Lord! You poor dear! Haven’t they taken you anywhere decent?”

“Many places, but all the same. I wish I could come to know Nio Esseia better. I have seen only the outside of the city—the wrapping of the package.” He used the phrase because he had been fascinated from the start by the Urrasti habit of wrapping everything up in clean, fancy paper or plastic or cardboard or foil. Laundry, books, vegetables, clothes, medicines, everything came inside layers and layers of wrappings. Even packets of paper were wrapped in several layers of paper. Nothing was to touch anything else. He had begun to feel that he, too, had been carefully packaged.

“I know. They made you go to the Historical Museum, and take a tour of the Dobunnae Monument, and listen to a speech in the Senate!” He laughed, because that had been precisely the itinerary one day last summer. “I know! They’re so stupid with foreigners. I shall see to it that you see the real Nio!”

“I should like that”

“I know all kinds of wonderful people. I collect people. Here you are trapped among all these stuffy professors and politicians…” She rattled on. He took pleasure in her inconsequential talk just as he did in the sunshine and the snow.

They came to the little station of Amoeno. She had her return ticket; the train was due in any moment.

“Don’t wait, you’ll freeze.”

He did not reply but just stood, bulky in the fleece-lined coat, looking amiably at her.

She looked down at the cuff of her coat and brushed a speck of snow off the embroidery.

“Have you a wife, Shevek?”

“No.”

“No family at all?”

“Oh—yes. A partner, our children. Excuse me, I was thinking of something else. A ‘wife,’ you see, I think of that as something that exists only on Urras.”

“What’s a ‘partner’?” She glanced up mischievously into his face.

“I think you would say a wife or husband.”

“Why didn’t she come with you?”

“She did not want to; and the younger child is only one… no, two, now. Also—” He hesitated.

“Why didn’t she want to come?”

“Well, there she has work to do, not here. If I had known how she would like so many things here, I would have asked her to come. But I did not. There is the question of safety, you see.”

“Safety here?”

He hesitated again, and finally said, “Also when I go home.”

“What will happen to you?” Vea asked, round-eyed. The train was pulling over the hill outside town.

“Oh, probably nothing. But there are some who consider me a traitor. Because I try to make friends with Urras, you see. They might make trouble when I go home. I don’t want that for her and the children. We had a little of it before I left. Enough.”