“Was the play that good?” Takver asked naïvely, coming out an inch or two from the blankets and studying Shevek’s profile.

“No, I don’t think so. It must have been funny on stage. He was only twenty when he wrote it, after all. He keeps writing it over. He’s never written anything else.”

“He keeps writing the same play?”

“He keeps writing the same play.”

“Ugh,” Takver said with pity and disgust.

“Every couple of decads he’d come and show it to me. And I’d read it or make a show of reading it and try to talk with him about it. He wanted desperately to talk about it, but he couldn’t. He was too frightened.”

“Of what? I don’t understand.”

“Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the human race, the brotherhood that rejected him. When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened.”

“You mean, just because some people called his play immoral and said he shouldn’t get a teaching posting, he decided everybody was against him? That’s a bit silly!”

“But who was for him?”

“Dap was—all his friends.”

“But he lost them. He got posted away.”

“Why didn’t he refuse the posting, then?”

“Listen, Takver. I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. You said it—you should have refused to go to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I’m a free man, I didn’t have to come here!… We always think it, and say it, but we don’t do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind, like a room where we can come and say, ‘I don’t have to do anything, I make my own choices, I’m free.’ And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where PDC posts us, and stay till we’re reposted.”

“Oh, Shev, that’s not true. Only since the drought. Before that there wasn’t half so much posting. People just worked up jobs where they wanted them, and joined a syndicate or formed one, and then registered with Divlab. Divlab mostly posted people who preferred to be in General Labor Pool. It’s going to go back to that again, now.”

“I don’t know. It ought to, of course. But even before the famine it wasn’t going in that direction, but away from it. Bedap was right: every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an increment of bureaucratic machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this is the way it was done, this is the way it is done, this is the way it has to be done… There was a lot of that, before the drought. Five years of stringent control may have fixed the pattern permanently. Don’t look so skeptical! Listen, you tell me, how many people do you know who refused to accept a posting—even before the famine?”

Takver considered the question. “Leaving out nuchnibi?”

“No, no. Nuchnibi are important.”

“Well, several of Dap’s friends—that nice composer, Salas, and some of the scruffy ones too. And real nuchnibi used to come through Round Valley when I was a kid. Only they cheated, I always thought. They told such lovely lies and stories, and told fortunes, everybody was glad to see them and keep them and feed them as long as they’d stay. But they never would stay long. But then people would just pick up and leave town, kids usually, some of them just hated farm work, and they’d just quit their posting and leave. People do that everywhere, all the time. They move on, looking for something better. You just don’t call it refusing posting!”