He plunged on through the other books Sabul doled out to him, the major works of contemporary Urrasti physics. His life grew even more hermitic. He was not active in the student syndicate, and did not attend the meetings of any other syndicates or federatives except the lethargic Physics Federation. The meetings of such groups, the vehicles of both social action and sociability, were the framework of life in any small community, but here in the city they seemed much less important. One was not necessary to them; there were always others ready to run things, and doing it well enough. Except for tenth-day duties and the usual janitorial assignments in his domicile and the laboratories, Shevek’s time was entirely on his own. He often omitted exercise and occasionally meals. However, he never missed the one course he was attending. Gvarab’s lecture group on Frequency and Cycle.

Gvarab was old enough that she often wandered and maundered. Attendance at her lectures was small and uneven. She soon picked out the thin boy with big ears as her one constant auditor. She began to lecture for him. The light, steady, intelligent eyes met hers, steadied her, woke her, she flashed to brilliance, regained the vision lost. She soared, and the other students in the room looked up confused or startled, even scared if they had the wits to be scared. Gvarab saw a much larger universe than most people were capable of seeing, and it made them blink. The light-eyed boy watched her steadily. In his face she saw her joy. What she offered, what she had offered for a whole lifetime, what no one had ever shared with her, he took, he shared. He was her brother, across the gulf of fifty years, and her redemption.

When they met in the physics offices or the refectory sometimes they fell straight to talking physics, but at other times Gvarab’s energy was insufficient for that, and then they found little to say, for the old woman was as shy as the young man. “You don’t eat enough,” she would tell him. He would smile and his ears would get red. Neither knew what else to say.

After he had been a half year at the Institute, Shevek gave Sabul a three-page thesis entitled “A Critique of Atro’s Infinite Sequency Hypothesis.” Sabul returned it to him after a decad, growling, “Translate it into Iotic.”

“I wrote it mostly in Iotic to start with,” Shevek said, “since I was using Atro’s terminology. I’ll copy out the original. What for?”

“What for? So that damned profiteer Atro can read it! There’s a ship in on the fifth of next decad.”

“A ship?”

“A freighter from Urras!”

Thus Shevek discovered that not only petroleum and mercury went back and forth between the sundered worlds, and not only books, such as the books he had been reading, but also letters. Letters! Letters to propertarians, to subjects of governments founded on the inequity of power, to individuals who were inevitably exploited by and exploiters of others, because they had consented to be elements in the State-Machine. Did such people actually exchange ideas with free people in a nonaggressive, voluntary manner? Could they really admit equality and participate in intellectual solidarity, or were they merely trying to dominate, to assert their power, to possess? The idea of actually exchanging letters with a propertarian alarmed him, but it would be interesting to find out…