“Look tired again sir,” Efor said. “Better rest.”

“No, I’m not tired.”

Efor observed him a moment. When Efor functioned as a servant his lined, clean-shaven face was quite expressionless; during the last hour Shevek had seen it go through extraordinary changes of harshness, humor, cynicism and pain. At the moment its expression was sympathetic yet detached.

“Different from all that where you come from,” Efor said.

“Very different.”

“Nobody ever out of work, there.”

There was a faint edge of irony, or question, in his voice.

“No.”

“And nobody hungry?”

“Nobody goes hungry while another eats.”

“Ah.”

“But we have been hungry. We have starved. There was a famine, you know, eight years ago. I knew a woman then who killed her baby, because she had no milk, and there was nothing else, nothing else to give it. It is not all… all milk and honey on Anarres, Efor.”

“I don’t doubt it, sir,” Efor said with one of his curious returns to polite diction. Then he said with a grimace drawing his lips back from his teeth, “All the same there’s none of them there!”

“Them?”

“You know, Mr. Shevek. What you said once. The owners.”

• • •

The next evening Atro called by. Pae must have been on the watch, for a few minutes after Efor admitted the old man, he came strolling in, and inquired with charming sympathy after Shevek’s indisposition. “You’ve been working much too hard these last couple of weeks, sir,” he said, “you mustn’t wear yourself out like this.” He did not sit down, but took his leave very soon, the soul of civility. Atro went on talking about the war in Benbili, which was becoming, as he put it, “a large-scale operation.”

“Do the people in this country approve of this war?” Shevek asked, interrupting a discourse on strategy. He had been puzzled by the absence of moral judgment in the birdseed papers on this subject. They had given up their ranting excitement; their wording was often exactly the same as that of the telefax bulletins issued by the government.

“Approve? You don’t think we’d lie down and let the damned Thuvians walk all over us? Our status as a world power is at stake!”

“But I meant the people, not the government. The… the people who must fight.”

“What’s it to them? They’re used to mass conscriptions. It’s what they’re for, my dear fellow! To fight for their country. And let me tell you, there’s no better soldier on earth than the Ioti man of the ranks, once he’s broken in to taking orders. In peacetime he may sprout sentimental pacifism, but the grit’s there, underneath. The common soldier has always been our greatest resource as a nation. It’s how we became the leader we are.”

“By climbing up on a pile of dead children?” Shevek said, but anger or, perhaps, an unadmitted reluctance to hurt the old man’s feelings, kept his voice muffled, and Atro did not hear him.