“No. I don’t want to stay here. I am no altruist! If you would help me in this too, I might go home. Perhaps the Ioti would be willing to send me home, even. It would be consistent, I think: to make me disappear, to deny my existence. Of course, they might find it easier to do by killing me or putting me in jail for life. I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t want to die here in Hell at all. Where does your soul go, when you die in Hell?” He laughed; he had regained all his gentleness of manner. “But if you could send me home, I think they would be relieved. Dead anarchists make martyrs, you know, and keep living for centuries. But absent ones can be forgotten.”

“I thought I knew what ‘realism’ was,” Keng said. She smiled, but it was not an easy smile.

“How can you, if you don’t know what hope is?”

“Don’t judge us too hardly, Shevek.”

“I don’t judge you at all. I only ask your help, for which I have nothing to give in return.”

“Nothing? You call your theory nothing?”

“Weigh it in the balance with the freedom of one single human spirit,” he said, turning to her, “and which will weigh heavier? Can you tell? I cannot.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Anarres

“I WANT to introduce a project,” said Bedap, “from the Syndicate of Initiative. You know that we’ve been in radio contact with Urras for about twenty decads—”

“Against the recommendation of this council, and the Defense Federative, and a majority vote of the List!”

“Yes,” Bedap said, looking the speaker up and down, but not protesting the interruption. There were no rules of parliamentary procedure at meetings in PDC. Interruptions were sometimes more frequent than statements. The process, compared to a well-managed executive conference, was a slab of raw beef compared to a winning diagram. Raw beef, however, functions better than a wiring diagram would, in its place—inside a living animal.

Bedap knew all his old opponents on the Import-Export Council; he had been coming and fighting them for three years now.

This speaker was a new one, a young man, probably a new lottery posting to the PDC List. Bedap looked him over benevolently and went on, “Let’s not refight old quarrels, shall we? I propose a new one. We’ve received an interesting message from a group on Urras. It came on the wave length our Ioti contacts use, but it didn’t come at a scheduled time, and was a weak signal. It seems to have been sent from a country called Benbili, not from A-Io. The group called themselves ‘The Odonian Society.’ It appears that they’re post-Settlement Odonians, existing in some fashion in the loopholes of law and government on Urras. Their message was to ‘the brothers on Anarres.’ You can read it in the Syndicate bulletin, it’s interesting. They ask if they might be allowed to send people here.”

“Send people here? Let Urrasti come here? Spies?”