But the choices of the social being are never made alone.

“Well,” Shevek said, “I just came back from a famine prevention posting. Anything else like that need doing?”

The clerk gave him an elder-sisterly look, incredulous but forgiving. “There’s about seven hundred Urgent calls posted around the room,” she said. “Which one would you like?”

“Any of them need math?”

“They’re mostly farming and skilled labor. Do you have any engineering training?”

“Not much.”

“Well, there’s work-coordinating. That certainly takes a head for figures. How about this one?”

“All right.”

“That’s down in Southwest, in the Dust, you know.”

“I’ve been in the Dust before. Besides, as you say, someday it will rain…

She nodded, smiling, and typed into his Divlab record: FROM Abbenay, NW Cent Inst Sci, TO Elbow, SW wk co, phosphate mill #1: EMERG PSTG: 5-1-3-165 —indefinite.

CHAPTER NINE

Urras

SHEVEK was awakened by the bells in the chapel tower pealing the Prime Harmony for morning religious service. Each note was like a blow on the back of his head. He was so sick and shaky he could not even sit up for a long time. He finally managed to shuffle into the bathroom and take along cold bath, which relieved the headache; but his whole body continued to feel strange to him—to feel, somehow, vile. As he began to be able to think again, fragments and moments of the night before came into his mind, vivid, senseless little scenes from the party at Vea’s. He tried not to think about them, and then could think of nothing else. Everything, everything became vile. He sat down at his desk, and sat there staring, motionless, perfectly miserable, for half an hour.

He had been embarrassed often enough, and had felt himself a fool. As a young man he had suffered from the sense that others thought him strange, unlike them; in later years he had felt, having deliberately invited, the anger and contempt of many of his fellows on Anarres. But he had never really accepted their judgment. He had never been ashamed.

He did not know that this paralyzing humiliation was a chemical sequel to getting drunk, like the headache. Nor would the knowledge have made much difference to him. Shame—the sense of vileness and of self-estrangement—was a revelation. He saw with a new clarity, a hideous clarity; and saw far past those incoherent memories of the end of the evening at Vea’s. It was not only poor Vea who had betrayed him. It was not only the alcohol that he had tried to vomit up; it was all the bread he had eaten on Urras.

He leaned his elbows on the desk and put his head on his hands, pressing in on the temples, the cramped position of pain; and he looked at his life in the light of shame.

On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of society.