“I want to see Anarres,” the Hainishman said. “Even before you came to Urras, I was curious about it. It began when I read Odo’s works. I became very interested. I have—” He hesitated, as if embarrassed, but continued in his repressed, conscientious way, “I have learned a little Pravic. Not much yet.”

“It is your own wish, then—your own initiative?”

“Entirely.”

“And you understand that it might be dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“Things are… a little broken loose, on Anarres. That’s what my friends on the radio have been telling me about. It was our purpose all along—our Syndicate, this journey of mine—to shake up things, to stir up, to break some habits, to make people ask questions. To behave like anarchists! All this has been going on while I was gone. So, you see, nobody is quite sure what happens next. And if you land with me, even more gets broken loose. I cannot push too far. I cannot take you as an official representative of some foreign government. That will not do, on Anarres.”

“I understand that.”

“Once you are there, once you walk through the wall with me, then as I see it you are one of us. We are responsible to you and you to us; you become an Anarresti, with the same options as all the others. But they are not safe options. Freedom is never very safe.” He looked around the tranquil, orderly room, with its simple consoles and delicate instruments, its high ceiling and windowless walls, and back at Ketho. “You would find yourself very much alone,” he said.

“My race is very old,” Ketho said. “We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?”

“We are the children of time,” Shevek said, in Pravic. The younger man looked at him a moment, and then repeated the words in Iotic: “We are the children of time.”

“I shall speak to the commander,” Ketho said, as grave as ever, but with a very slight tremor in his voice of excitement, of hope.

• • •

Very late on the following ship night, Shevek was in the Davenant’s garden. The lights were out, there, and it was illuminated only by starlight. The air was quite cold. A night-blooming flower from some unimaginable world had opened among the dark leaves and was sending out its perfume with patient, unavailing sweetness to attract some unimaginable moth trillions of miles away, in a garden on a world circling another star. The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness. Shevek stood at the high, cleared view port, looking at the night side of Anarres, a dark curve across half the stars. He was wondering if Takver would be there, at the Port. She had not yet arrived in Abbenay from Peace-and-Plenty when he last talked with Bedap, so he had left it to Bedap to discuss and decide with her whether it would be wise for her to come out to the Port. “You don’t think I could stop her even if it wasn’t?” Bedap had said. He wondered also what kind of ride she might have got from the Sorruba coast; a dirigible, he hoped, if she had brought the girls along. Train riding was hard, with children. He still recalled the discomforts of the trip from Chakar to Abbenay, in ’68, when Sadik had been trainsick for three mortal days.