“Though sometimes,” he said, “they make you go away by yourself for a while.”

“But what,” Oiie said abruptly, as if the question, long kept back, burst from him under pressure, “what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?”

“Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository. As for violence, well, I don’t know, Oiie; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”

“All right, but how do you get people to do the dirty work?”

“What dirty work?” asked Oiie’s wife, not following.

“Garbage collecting, grave digging,” Oiie said; Shevek added, “Mercury mining,” and nearly said, “Shit processing,” but recollected the Ioti taboo on scatological words. He had reflected, quite early in his stay on Urras, that the Urrasti lived among mountains of excrement, but never mentioned shit.

“Well, we all do them. But nobody has to do them for very long, unless he likes the work. One day in each decad the community management committee or the block committee or whoever needs you can ask you to join in such work, they make rotating lists. Then the disagreeable work posting, or dangerous ones like the mercury mines and mills, normally they’re for one half year only.”

“But then the whole personnel must consist of people just learning the job.”

“Yes. It’s not efficient, but what else is to be done? You can’t tell a man to work on a job that will cripple him or kill him in a few years. Why should he do that?”

“He can refuse the order?”

“It’s not an order, Oiie. He goes to Divlab—the Division of Labor office—and says, I want to do such and such, what have you got? And they tell him where there are jobs.”

“But then why do people do the dirty work at all? Why do they even accept the one-day-in-ten jobs?”

“Because they are done together… And other reasons. You know, life on Anarres isn’t rich, as it is here. In the little communities there isn’t very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenth day it’s pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people… And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there’s no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoize, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing… But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work’s sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one’s neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One’s own pleasure, and the respect of one’s fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mightly force.”