“I’m not leaving the Syndicate, Bedap.”

Bedap lifted his head, and said after a minute. “No, I know you’re not.”

“All right. Let’s go to dinner. This belly growls: listen to it, Pilun, hear it? Rrowr, rrowr!”

“Hup!” Pilun said in a tone of command. Shevek picked her up and stood up, swinging her onto his shoulder. Behind his head and the child’s, the single mobile hanging in this room oscillated slightly. It was a large piece made of wires pounded flat, so that edge-on they all but disappeared, making the ovals into which they were fashioned flicker at intervals, vanishing, as did, in certain lights, the two thin, clear bubbles of glass that moved with the oval wires in completely interwoven ellipsoid orbits about the common center, never quite meeting, never entirely parting. Takver called it the Inhabitation of Time.

They went to the Pekesh commons, and waited till the registry board showed a sign-out, so they could bring Bedap in as a guest. His registering there signed him out of the commons where he usually ate, as the system was coordinated citywide by a computer. It was one of the highly mechanized “homeostatic processes” beloved by the early Settlers, which persisted only in Abbenay. Like the less elaborate arrangements used elsewhere, it never quite worked out; there were shortages, surpluses, and frustrations, but not major ones. Sign-outs at Pekesh commons were infrequent, as the kitchen was the best known in Abbenay, having a tradition of great cooks. An opening appeared at last, and they went in. Two young people whom Bedap knew slightly as dom neighbors of Shevek’s and Takver’s joined them at table. Otherwise they were let alone—left alone. Which? It did not seem to matter. They had a good dinner, a good time talking. But every now and then Bedap felt that around them there was a circle of silence.

“I don’t know what the Urrasti will think up next,” he said, and though he was speaking lightly he found himself, to his annoyance, lowering his voice. “They’ve asked to come here, and asked Shev to come there; what will the next move be?”

“I didn’t know they’d actually asked Shev to go there,” Takver said with a half frown.

“Yes, you did,” Shevek said. “When they told me that they’d given me the prize, you know, the Seo Oen, they asked if I couldn’t come, remember? To get the money that goes with it!” Shevek smiled, luminous. If there was a circle of silence around him, it was no bother to him, he had always been alone.

“That’s right. I did know that. It just didn’t register as an actual possibility. You’d been talking for decads about suggesting in PDC that somebody might go to Urras, just to shock them.”

“That’s what we finally did, this afternoon. Dap made me say it.”

“Were they shocked?”

“Hair on end, eyes bulging—”

Takver giggled. Pilun sat in a high chair next to Shevek, exercising her teeth on a piece of holum bread and her voice in song. “O mathery bathery,” she proclaimed, “Abbery abbery babber dab!” Shevek, versatile, replied in the same vein. Adult conversation proceeded without intensity and with interruptions. Bedap did not mind, he had learned long ago that you took Shevek with complications or not at all. The most silent one of them all was Sadik.