At night in the Project camps everybody coughed. In the daytime they coughed less; they were too busy to cough. The dust was their enemy, the fine, dry stuff that clogged the throat and lungs; their enemy and their charge, their hope. Once that dust had lain rich and dark in the shade of trees. After their long work, it might do so again.

She brings the green leaf from the stone,

From heart of rock clear water running…

Gimar was always humming the tune, and now in the hot evening returning to camp over the plain she sang the words aloud.

“Who does? Who’s ‘she’?” asked Shevek.

Gimar smiled. Her broad, silky face was smeared and caked with dust, her hair was full of dust, she smelled strongly and agreeably of sweat.

“I grew up in Southrising,” she said. “Where the miners are. It’s a miner song.”

“What miners?”

“Don’t you know? People who were already here when the Settlers came. Some of them stayed and joined the solidarity. Goldminers, tinminers. They still have some feast days and songs of their own. The tadde^[†] was a miner, he used to sing me that when I was little.”

“Well, then, who’s ‘she’?”

“I don’t know, it’s just what the song says. Isn’t it what we’re doing here? Bringing green leaves out of stones!”

“Sounds like religion.”

“You and your fancy book-words. It’s just a song. Oh, I wish we were back at the other camp and could have a swim. I stink!”

“I stink.”

“We all stink.”

“In solidarity…

But this camp was fifteen kilos from the beaches of the Temae and there was only dust to swim in.

There was a man in camp whose name, spoken, sounded like Shevek’s: Shevet. When one was called the other answered. Shevek felt a kind of affinity for the man, a relation more particular than that of brotherhood because of this random similarity. A couple of times he saw Shevet eyeing him. They did not speak to each other yet.

Shevek’s first decads in the afforestation project had been spent in silent resentment and exhaustion. People who had chosen to work in centrally functional fields such as physics should not be called upon for these projects and special levies. Wasn’t it immoral to do work you didn’t enjoy? The work needed doing but a lot of people didn’t care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work. In fact, a tot of them could do it better than he could. He had been proud of his strength, and had always volunteered for the “heavies” on tenth-day rotational duty; but here it was day after day, eight hours a day, in dust and heat. All day he would look forward to evening when he could be alone and think, and the instant he got to the sleeping tent after supper his head flopped down and he slept like a stone till dawn, and never a thought crossed his mind.