“People do know who he is,” Bedap said. “It’s funny, because they can’t understand his books any more than I can. A few hundred do, he thinks. Those students in the Divisional Institutes who try to organize Simultaneity courses. I think a few dozen would be a liberal estimate, myself. And yet people know of him, they have this feeling he’s something to be proud of. That’s one thing the Syndicate has done, I suppose, if nothing else. Printed Shev’s books. It may be the only wise thing we’ve done.”

“Oh, now! You must have had a bad session at PDC today.”

“We did. I’d like to cheer you up, Takver, but I can’t. The Syndicate is cutting awfully close to the basic societal bond, the fear of the stranger. There was a young fellow there today openly threatening violent reprisal. Well, it’s a poor option, but he’ll find others ready to take it. And that Rulag, by damn, she’s a formidable opponent!”

“You know who she is, Dap?”

“Who she is?”

“Shev never told you? Well, he doesn’t talk about her. She’s the mother.”

“Shev’s mother?”

Takver nodded. “She left when he was two. The father stayed with him. Nothing unusual, of course. Except Shev’s feelings. He feels that he lost something essential—he and the father both. He doesn’t make a general principle out of it, that parents should always keep the children, or anything. But the importance loyalty has for him, it goes back to that, I think.”

“What’s unusual,” said Bedap energetically, oblivious of Pilun, who had gone sound asleep on his lap, “distinctly unusual, is her feelings about him! She’s been waiting for him to come to an Import-Export meeting, you could tell, today. She knows he’s the soul of the group, and she hates us because of him. Why? Guilt? Has the Odonian Society gone so rotten we’re motivated by guilt?… You know, now that I know it, they look alike. Only in her, it’s all gone hard, rock-hard—dead.”

The door opened as he was speaking. Shevek and Sadik came in. Sadik was ten years old, tall for her age and thin, all long legs, supple and fragile, with a cloud of dark hair. Behind her came Shevek; and Bedap, looking at him in the curious new light of his kinship with Rulag, saw him as one occasionally sees a very old friend, with a vividness to which all the past contributes: the splendid reticent face, full of life but worn down, worn to the bone. It was an intensely individual face, and yet the features were not only like Rulag’s but like many others among the Anarresti, a people selected by a vision of freedom, and adapted to a barren world, a world of distances, silences, desolations.

In the room, meantime, much closeness, commotion, communion: greetings, laughter, Pilun being passed around, rather crossly on her part, to be hugged, the bottle being passed around to be poured, questions, conversations. Sadik was the center first, because she was the least often there of the family; then Shevek. “What did old Greasy Beard want?”