The man smiled and whispered, “Shoot us.”

As there had been scattered gunfire around, near and far, for hours, and an occasional solid explosion, and the crackling of the helicopters, his opinion seemed well founded. The reason for his smile was less clear.

He died of loss of blood that night, while they lay side by side for warmth on the mattress Shevek had made from packing-crate straw. He was already stiff when Shevek woke, and sat up, and listened to the silence in the great dark basement and outside on the street and in all the city, a silence of death.

CHAPTER TEN

Anarres

RAIL lines in Southwest ran for the most part on embankments a meter or more above the plain. There was less dust drift on an elevated roadbed, and it gave travelers a good view of desolation.

Southwest was the only one of the eight Divisions of Anarres that lacked any major body of water. Marshes were formed by polar melt in summer in the far south; towards the equator there were only shallow alkaline lakes in vast salt pans. There were no mountains; every hundred kilometers or so a chain of hills ran northsouth, barren, cracked, weathered into cliffs and pinnacles. They were streaked with violet and red, and on cliff faces the rockmoss, a plant that lived in any extreme of heat, cold, aridity, and wind, grew in bold verticals of gray-green, making a plaid with the striations of the sandstone. There was no other color in the landscape but dun, fading to whitish where salt pans lay half covered with sand. Rare thunderclouds moved over the plains, vivid white in the purplish sky. They cast no rain, only shadows. The embankment and the glittering rails ran straight behind the truck train to the end of sight and straight before it to the end of sight.

“Nothing you can do with Southwest,” said the driver, “but get across it.”

His companion did not answer, having fallen asleep. His head jiggled to the vibration of the engine. His hands, work-hard and blackened by frostbite, lay loose on his thighs; his face in relaxation was lined and sad. He had hitched the ride in Copper Mountain, and since there were no other passengers the driver had asked him to ride in the cab for company. He had gone to sleep at once. The driver glanced at him from time to time with disappointment but sympathy. He had seen so many worn-out people in the last years that it seemed the normal condition to him.

Late in the long afternoon the man woke up, and after staring out at the desert a while he asked, “You always do this run alone?”

“Last three, four years.”

“Ever break down out here?”

“Couple of times. Plenty of rations and water in the locker. You hungry, by the way?”

“Not yet.”

“They send down the breakdown rig from Lonesome within a day or so.”

“That’s the next settlement?”

“Right. Seventeen hundred kilometers from Sedep Mines to Lonesome. Longest run between towns on Anarres. I’ve been doing it for eleven years.”