“No, as settlers.”

“They want the Settlement reopened, is that it, Bedap?”

“They say they’re being hounded by their government, and are hoping for—”

“Reopen the Settlement! To any profiteer who calls himself an Odonian?”

To report an Anarresti managerial debate in full would be difficult; it went very fast, several people often speaking at once, nobody speaking at great length, a good deal of sarcasm, a great deal left unsaid; the tone emotional, often fiercely personal; an end was reached, yet there was no conclusion. It was like an argument among brothers, or among thoughts in an undecided mind.

“If we let these so-called Odonians come, how do they propose to get here?”

There spoke the opponent Bedap dreaded, the cool, intelligent woman named Rulag. She had been his cleverest enemy all year in the council. He glanced at Shevek, who was attending this council for the first time, to draw his attention to her. Somebody had told Bedap that Rulag was an engineer, and he had found in her the engineer’s clarity and pragmatism of mind, plus the mechanist’s hatred of complexity and irregularity. She opposed the Syndicate of Initiative on every issue, including that of its right to exist. Her arguments were good, and Bedap respected her. Sometimes when she spoke of the strength of Urras, and the danger of bargaining with the strong from a position of weakness, he believed her.

For there were times when Bedap wondered, privately, whether he and Shevek, when they got together in the winter of ’68 and discussed the means by which a frustrated physicist might print his work and communicate it to physicists on Urras, had not set off an uncontrollable chain of events. When they had finally set up radio contact, the Urrasti had been more eager to talk, to exchange information, than they had expected; and when they had printed reports of those exchanges, the opposition on Anarres had been more virulent than they had expected. People on both worlds were paying more attention to them than was really comfortable. When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.

“I suppose they’d come on one of the freighters,?’ he replied. “Like good Odonians, they’d hitchhike. If their government, or the Council of World Governments, lets them. Would they let them? Would the archists do the anarchists a favor? That’s what I’d like to find out. If we invited a small group, six or eight, of these people, what would happen at that end?”

“Laudable curiosity,” Rulag said. “We’d know the danger better, all right, if we knew better how things really worked on Urras. But the danger lies in the act of finding out.” She stood up, signifying that she wanted to hold the floor for more than a sentence or two. Bedap winced, and glanced again at Shevek who sat beside him. “Look out for this one,” he muttered. Shevek made no response, but he was usually reserved and shy at meetings, no good at all unless he got moved deeply by something, in which case he was a surprisingly good speaker. He sat looking down at his hands. But as Rulag spoke, Bedap noticed that though she was addressing him, she kept glancing at Shevek.