They did so; they bade farewell with mutual warmth. Shevek got into the car, and then got out again. “I was forgetting,” he said, “is there time to see one other thing in Drio?”

“There isn’t anything else in Drio,” Pae said, polite as ever and trying hard to hide his annoyance over Shevek’s five-hour escapade among the engineers.

“I should like to see the fort.”

“What fort, sir?”

“An old castle, from the times of the kings. It was used later as a prison.”

“Anything like that would have been torn down. The Foundation rebuilt the town entirely.”

When they were in the car and the chauffeur was closing the doors, Chifoilisk (another probable source of Pae’s ill humor) asked, “What did you want to see another castle for, Shevek? Should have thought you’d had enough old ruins to hold you for a while.”

“The Fort in Drio was where Odo spent nine years,” Shevek replied. His face was set, as it had been since he talked with Oegeo. “After the Insurrection of 747. She wrote the Prison Letters there, and the Analogy.”

“Afraid it’s been pulled down,” Pae said sympathetically. “Drio was a moribund sort of town, and the Foundation just wiped out and started fresh.”

Shevek nodded. But as the car followed a riverside highway toward the turnoff to Ieu Eun it passed a bluff on the curve of the river Seisse, and up on the bluff there was a building, heavy, ruinous, implacable, with broken towers of black stone. Nothing could have been less like the gorgeous lighthearted buildings of the Space Research Foundation, the showy domes, the bright factories, the tidy lawns and paths. Nothing could have made them look so much like bits of colored paper.

“That, I believe, is the Fort,” Chifoilisk remarked with his usual satisfaction at placing the tactless remark where it was least wanted.

“Gone all to ruins,” Pae said. “Must be empty.”

“Want to stop and have a look at it, Shevek?” Chifoilisk asked, ready to tap on the chauffeur’s screen.

“No,” Shevek said.

He had seen what he wanted to see. There was still a Fort in Drio. He did not need to enter it and seek down ruined halls for the cell in which Odo had spent nine years. He knew what a prison cell was like.

He looked up, his face still set and cold, at the ponderous dark walls that now loomed almost above the car. I have been here for a long time, the fort said, and I am still here.

When he was back in his rooms, after dinner in the Senior Faculty Refectory, he sat down alone by the unlighted fire. It was summer in A-Io, getting on towards the longest day of the year, and though it was past eight it was not yet dark. The sky outside the arched windows still showed a tinge of the daylight color of the sky, a pure tender blue. The air was mild, fragrant of cut grass and wet earth. There was a light in the chapel, across the grove, and a faint undertone of music on that lightly stirring air. Not the birds singing, but a human music. Shevek listened. Somebody was practicing the Numerical Harmonies of the chapel harmonium. They were as familiar to Shevek as to any Urrasti. Odo had not tried to renew the basic relationships of music, when she renewed the relationships of men. She had always respected the necessary. The Settlers of Anarres had left the laws of man behind them, but had brought the laws of harmony along.