“I was under the back seat. The taxi was commandeered, is that the word? It was a risk some people took for me.” He looked down at his hands, clasped on his lap. He sat perfectly quietly and spoke quietly, but there was an inner tension, a strain, visible in his eyes and in the lines around his mouth. He thought awhile, and went on in the same detached way, “It was luck, at first. When I came out of hiding, I was lucky not to be arrested at once. But I got into Old Town. After that it was not just luck. They thought for me where I might go, they planned how to get me there, they took the risks.” He said a word in his own language, then translated it: “Solidarity…”

“It is very strange,” said the Ambassador from Terra. “I know almost nothing about your world, Shevek. I know only what the Urrasti tell us, since your people won’t let us come there. I know, of course, that the planet is arid and bleak, and how the colony was founded, that it is an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism, that it has survived for a hundred and seventy years. I have read a little of Odo’s writings—not very much. I thought that it was all rather unimportant to matters on Urras now, rather remote, an interesting experiment. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? It is important. Perhaps Anarres is the key to Urras… The revolutionists in Nio, they come from that same tradition. They weren’t just striking for better wages or protesting the draft. They are not only socialists, they are anarchists; they were striking against power. You see, the size of the demonstration, the intensity of popular feeling, and the government’s panic reaction, all seemed very hard to understand. Why so much commotion? The government here is not despotic. The rich are very rich indeed, but the poor are not so very poor. They are neither enslaved nor starving. Why aren’t they satisfied with bread and speeches? Why are they supersensitive?… Now I begin to see why. But what is still inexplicable is that the government of A-Io, knowing this libertarian tradition was still alive, and knowing the discontent in the industrial cities, still brought you here. Like bringing the match to the powder mill!”

“I was not to be near the powder mill. I was to be kept from the populace, to live among scholars and the rich. Not to see the poor. Not to see anything ugly. I was to be wrapped up in cotton in a box in a wrapping in a carton in a plastic film, like everything here. There I was to be happy and do my work, the work I could not do on Anarres. And when it was done I was to give it to them, so they could threaten you with it.”

“Threaten us? Terra, you mean, and Hain, and the other interspatial powers? Threaten us with what?”