Rulag sat forward. She was smiling a little. “Anyone can leave Anarres,” she said. Her light eyes glanced from Shevek to Bedap and back. “He can go whenever he likes, if the propertarians’ freighters will take him. He can’t come back.”

“Who says he can’t?” Bedap demanded.

“The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement. Nobody will be allowed off the freight ships farther than the boundary of the Port of Anarres.”

“Well, now, that was surely meant to apply to Urrasti, not Anarresti,” said an old adviser, Ferdaz, who liked to stick his oar in even when it steered the boat off the course he wanted.

“A person coming from Urras is an Urrasti,” said Rulag.

“Legalisms, legalisms! What’s all this quibbling?” said a calm, heavy woman named Trepil.

“Quibbling!” cried the new member, the young man. He had a Northrising accent and a deep, strong voice. “If you don’t like quibbling, try this. If there are people here that don’t like Anarres, let ’em go. I’ll help. I’ll carry ’em to the Port, I’ll even kick ’em there! But if they try to come sneaking back, there’s going to be some of us there to meet them. Some real Odonians. And they won’t find us smiling and saying, ‘Welcome home, brothers.’ They’ll find their teeth knocked down their throats and their balls kicked up into their bellies. Do you understand that? Is it clear enough for you?”

“Clear, no; plain, yes. Plain as a fart,” said Bedap. “Clarity is a function of thought. You should learn some Odonianism before you speak here.”

“You’re not worthy to say the name of Odo!” the young man shouted. “You’re traitors, you and the whole Syndicate! There are people all over Anarres watching you. You think we don’t know that Shevek’s been asked to go to Urras, to go sell Anarresti science to the profiteers? You think we don’t know that all you snivelers would love to go there and live rich and let the propertarians pat you on the back? You can go! Good riddance! But if you try coming back here, you’ll meet with justice!”

He was on his feet and leaning across the table, shouting straight into Bedap’s face. Bedap looked up at him and said, “You don’t mean justice, you mean punishment. Do you think they’re the same thing?”

“He means violence,” Rulag said. “And if there is violence, you will have caused it. You and your Syndicate. And you will have deserved it.”

A thin, small, middle-aged man beside Trepil began speaking, at first so softly, in a voice hoarsened by the dust cough, that few of them heard him. He was a visiting delegate from a Southwest miners’ syndicate, not expected to speak on this matter. “… what men deserve,” he was saying. “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” They were, of course, Odo’s words from the Prison Letters, but spoken in the weak, hoarse voice they made a strange effect, as if the man were working them out word by word himself, as if they came from his own heart, slowly, with difficulty, as the water wells up slowly, slowly from the desert sand.