“Informed!” Kvetur said. “I’ve heard about Urras ever since nursery! I don’t care if I never see another picture of foul Urrasti cities and greasy Urrasti bodies!”

“That’s just it,” said Tirin with the glee of one following logic. “All the material on Urras available to students is the same. Disgusting, immoral, excremental. But look. If it was that bad when the Settlers left, how has it kept on going for a hundred and fifty years? If they were so sick, why aren’t they dead? Why haven’t their propertarian societies collapsed? What are we so afraid of?”

“Infection,” said Bedap.

“Are we so feeble we can’t withstand a little exposure? Anyhow, they can’t all be sick. No matter what their society’s like, some of them must be decent. People vary here, don’t they? Are we all perfect Odonians? Look at that snotball Pesus!”

“But in a sick organism, even a healthy cell is doomed,” said Bedap.

“Oh, you can prove anything using the analogy, and you know it. Anyhow, how do we actually know their society is sick?”

Bedap gnawed on his thumbnail. “You’re saying that PDC and the educational supplies syndicate are lying to us about Urras.”

“No; I said we only know what we’re told. And do you know what we’re told?” Tirin’s dark, snub-nosed face, clear in the bright bluish moonlight, turned to them. “Kvet said it, a minute ago. He’s got the message. You heard it: detest Urras, hate Urras, fear Urras.”

“Why not?” Kvetur demanded. “Look how they treated us Odonians!”

“They gave us their Moon, didn’t they?”

“Yes, to keep us from wrecking their profiteering states and setting up the just society there. And as soon as they got rid of us, I’ll bet they started building up governments and armies faster than ever, because nobody was left to stop them. If we opened the Port to them, you think they’d come like friends and brothers? A thousand million of them, and twenty million of us? They’d wipe us out, or make us all what do you call it, what’s the word, slaves, to work the mine for them!”

“All right. I agree that it’s probably wise to fear Urras. But why hate? Hate’s not functional; why are we taught it? Could it be that if we knew what Urras was really like, we’d like it—some of it—some of us? That what PDC wants to prevent is not just some of them coming here, but some of us wanting to go there?”

“Go to Urras?” Shevek said, startled.

They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. They were intelligent, their minds were already disciplined to the clarity of science, and they were sixteen years old. But at this point the pleasure of the argument ceased for Shevek, as it had earlier for Kvetur. He was disturbed. “Who’d ever want to go to Urras?” he demanded. “What for?”