No use, no use thinking this way. When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.

There were no parks in downtown Nio, the land was far too valuable to waste on amenity. He kept getting deeper into the same great, glittering streets that he had been taken through many times. He came to Saemtenevia Street and crossed it hurriedly, not wanting a repetition of the daylight nightmare. Now he was in the commercial district. Banks, office buildings, government buildings. Was all Nio Esseia this? Huge shining boxes of stone and glass, immense, ornate, enormous packages, empty, empty.

Passing a ground-floor window marked Art Gallery, he turned in, thinking to escape the moral claustrophobia of the streets and find the beauty of Urras again in a museum. But all the pictures in the museum had price tickets attached to their frames. He stared at a skillfully painted nude. Her ticket read 4,000 IMU. “That’s a Fei Feite,” said a dark man appearing noiselessly at his elbow. “We had five a week ago. Biggest thing on the art market before long. A Feite is a sure investment, sir.”

“Four thousand units is the money it costs to keep two families alive for a year in this city,” Shevek said.

The man inspected him and said drawling, “Yes, well, you see, sir, that happens to be a work of art.”

“Art? A man makes art because he has to. Why was that made?”

“You’re an artist, I take it,” the man said, now with open insolence.

“No, I am a man who knows shit when he sees it!” The dealer shrank back. When he was out of Shevek’s reach, he began to say something about the police. Shevek grimaced and strode out of the shop. Halfway down the block he stopped. He couldn’t go on this way.

But where could he go?

To someone… to someone, another person. A human being. Someone who would give help, not sell it. Who? Where?

He thought of Oiie’s children, the little boys who liked him, and for some time could think of no one else. Then an image rose in his mind, distant, small, and clear: Oiie’s sister. What was her name? Promise you’ll call, she had said, and since then she had twice written him invitations to dinner parties, in a bold childish hand, on thick, sweet-scented paper. He had ignored them, among all the invitations from strangers. Now he remembered them.

He remembered at the same time the other message, the one that had appeared inexplicably in his coat pocket: Join with us your brothers. But he could not find any brothers, on Urras.

He went into the nearest shop. It was a sweet shop, all golden scrolls and pink plaster, with rows of glass cases full of boxes and tins and baskets of candies and confections, pink, brown, cream, gold. He asked the woman behind the cases if she would help him find a telephone number. He was now subdued, after his fit of bad temper in the art dealer’s, and so humbly ignorant and foreign that the woman was won over. She not only helped him look up the name in the ponderous directory of telephone numbers, but placed the call for him on the shop phone.