“Tirin.”

“Don’t remember.”

“At Northsetting Regional. Dark boy, snub nose—”

“Oh, Tirin! Of course. I was thinking of Abbenay.”

“I saw him, in Southwest.”

“You saw Tirin? How was he?”

Shevek said nothing for a while, tracing out the weave of the blanket with one finger. “Remember what Bedap told us about him?”

“That he kept getting kleggich postings, and moving around, and finally went to Segvina Island, didn’t he? And then Dap lost track of him.”

“Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”

“At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty—Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ‘I must not! It is not moral! It is not good business!’ Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”

“He played the Urrasti?”

“Yes. He was marvelous.”

“He showed me the play. Several times.”

“Where did you meet him? In Grand Valley?”

“No, before, in Elbow. He was janitor for the mill.”

“Had he chosen that?”

“I don’t think Tir was able to choose at all, by then… Bedap always thought that he was forced to go to Segvina, that he was bullied into asking for therapy. I don’t know. When I saw him, several years after therapy, he was a destroyed person.”

“You think they did something at Segvina—?”

“I don’t know; I think the Asylum does try to offer shelter, a refuge. To judge from their syndical publications, they’re at least altruistic. I doubt that they drove Tir over the edge.”

“But what did break him, then? Just not finding a posting he wanted?”

“The play broke him.”

“The play? The fuss those old turds made about it? Oh, but listen, to be driven crazy by that kind of moralistic scolding you’d have to be crazy already. All he had to do was ignore it!”

“Tir was crazy already. By our society’s standards.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I think Tir’s a born artist. Not a craftsman—a creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who’s got to turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man who praises through rage.”