“I can’t go back. Not yet. I want to meet these people.”

Efor stood silent. Perhaps it was his life’s habit as a servant, as one who obeys, that made him nod at last and say, whispering, “Tuio Maedda, he who you want. In Joking Lane, in Old Town. The grocery.”

“Pae says I am forbidden to leave the campus. They can stop me if they see me take the train.”

“Taxi, maybe,” Efor said. “I call you one, you go down by the stairs. I know Kae Oimon on the stand. He got sense. But I don’t know.”

“All right. Right now. Pae was just here, he saw me, he thinks I’m staying in because I’m ill. What time is it?”

“Half past seven.”

“If I go now, I have the night to find where I should go. Call the taxi, Efor.”

“I’ll pack you a bag, sir—”

“A bag for what?”

“You’ll need clothes—”

“I’m wearing clothes! Go on.”

“You can’t just go with nothing,” Efor protested. This made him more anxious and uneasy than anything else. “You got money?”

“Oh—yes. I should take that.”

Shevek was on the move already; Efor scratched his head, looked grim and dour, but went off to the hail phone to call the taxi. He returned to find Shevek waiting outside the hall door with his coat on. “Go downstairs,” Efor said, grudgingly. “Kae be at the back door, five minutes. Tell him go out by Grove Road, no checkpoint there like at the main gate. Don’t go by the gate, they stop you there sure.”

“Will you be blamed for this, Efor?”

They were both whispering.

“I don’t know you gone. Morning, I say you don’t get up yet. Sleeping. Keep ’em off a while.”

Shevek took him by the shoulders, embraced him, shook his hand. “Thank you, Efor!”

“Good luck,” the man said, bewildered. Shevek was already gone.

• • •

Shevek’s costly day with Vea had taken most of his ready cash, and the taxi ride in to Nio took ten units more. He got out at a major subway station and by using his map worked his way by subway into Old Town, a section of the city he had never seen. Joking Lane was not on the map, so he got off the train at the central stop for Old Town. When he came up from the spacious marble station into the street he stopped in confusion. This did not look like Nio Esseia.

A fine, foggy rain was falling, and it was quite dark; there were no streetlights. The lampposts were there, but the lights were not turned on, or were broken. Yellow gleams slitted from around shuttered windows here and there. Down the street, light streamed from an open doorway, around which a group of men were lounging, talking loud. The pavement, greasy with rain, was littered with scraps of paper and refuse. The shopfronts, as well as he could make them out, were low, and were all covered up with heavy metal or wooden shutters, except for one which had been gutted by fire and stood black and blank, shards of glass still sticking in the frames of the broken windows. People went by, silent hasty shadows.