Some ways before him, down the darkening path, a person sat reading on a stone bench.

Shevek went forward slowly. He came to the bench and stood looking at the figure who sat with head bowed over the book in the green-gold dusk under the trees. It was a woman of fifty or sixty, strangely dressed, her hair pulled back in a knot. Her left hand on her chin nearly hid the stern mouth, her right held the papers on her knee. They were heavy, those papers; the cold hand on them was heavy. The light was dying fast but she never looked up. She went on reading the proof sheets of The Social Organism.

Shevek looked at Odo for a while, and then he sat down on the bench beside her.

He had no concept of status at all, and there was plenty of room on the bench. He was moved by a pure impulse of companionship.

He looked at the strong, sad profile, and at the hands, an old woman’s hands. He looked up into the shadowy branches. For the first time in his life he comprehended that Odo, whose face he had known since his infancy, whose ideas were central and abiding in his mind and the mind of everyone he knew, that Odo had never set foot on Anarres: that she had lived, and died, and was buried, in the shadow of green-leaved trees, in unimaginable cities, among people speaking unknown languages, on another world. Odo was an alien: an exile.

The young man sat beside the statue in the twilight, one almost as quiet as the other.

At last, realizing it was getting dark, he got up and made off into the streets again, asking directions to the Central Institute of the Sciences.

It was not far; he got there not long after the lights went on. A registrar or vigilkeeper was in the little office at the entrance, reading. He had to knock at the open door to get her attention. “Shevek,” he said. It was customary to start conversation with a stranger by offering your name as a kind of handle for him to take hold of. There were not many other handles to offer. There was no rank, no terms of rank, no conventional respectful forms of address.

“Kokvan,” the woman responded. “Weren’t you expecting to get in yesterday?”

“They’ve changed the cargo-dirigible schedule. Is there an empty bed in one of the dorms?”

“Number 46 is empty. Across the courtyard, the building to the left. There’s a note for you here from Sabul. He says call on him in the morning at the physics office.”

“Thanks!” said Shevek, and strode off across the broad paved courtyard swinging his luggage—a winter coat and a spare pair of boots—in his hand. Lights were on in rooms all round the quadrangle. There was a murmur, a presence of people in the quietness. Something stirred in the clear, keen air of the city night, a sense of drama, of promise.