The large, calm room was shadowy and silent, darkening. Shevek looked around it, the perfect double arches of the windows, the faintly gleaming edges of the parquet floor, the strong, dim curve of the stone chimney, the paneled walls, admirable in their proportion. It was a beautiful and humane room. It was a very old room. This Senior Faculty House, they told him, had been built in the year 540, four hundred years ago, two hundred and thirty years before the Settlement of Anarres. Generations of scholars had lived, worked, talked, thought, slept, died in this room before Odo was ever born. The Numerical Harmonies had drifted over the lawn, through the dark leaves of the grove, for centuries. I have been here for a long time, the room said to Shevek, and I am still here. What are you doing here?

He had no answer. He had no right to all the grace and bounty of this world, earned and maintained by the work, the devotion, the faithfulness of its people. Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history. The Settlers of Anarres had turned their backs on the Old World and its past, opted for the future only. But as surely as the future becomes the past, the past becomes the future. To deny is not to achieve. The Odonians who left Urras had been wrong, wrong in their desperate courage, to deny their history, to forgo the possibility of return. The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.

He had come to love Urras, but what good was his yearning love? He was not part of it. Nor was he part of the world of his birth.

The loneliness, the certainty of isolation, that he had felt in his first hour aboard the Mindful, rose up in him and asserted itself as his true condition, ignored, suppressed, but absolute.

He was alone, here, because he came from a self-exiled society. He had always been alone on his own world because he had exiled himself from his society. The Settlers had taken one step away. He had taken two. He stood by himself, because he had taken the metaphysical risk.

And he had been fool enough to think that he might serve to bring together two worlds to which he did not belong.

The blue of the night sky outside the windows drew his eyes. Over the vague darkness of foliage and the tower of the chapel, above the dark line of the hills, which at night always seemed smaller and more remote, a light was growing, a large, soft radiance. Moonrise, he thought, with a grateful sense of familiarity. There is no break in the wholeness of time. He had seen the Moon rise when he was a little child, from the window of the domicile in Wide Plains, with Palat; over the hills of his boyhood; over the dry plains of the Dust; over the roofs of Abbenay, with Takver watching it beside him.