He brought this matter up with the Physics Federation, which Sabul seldom bothered to attend. Nobody there attached importance to the issue of free communication with the ideological enemy. Some of them lectured Shevek for working in a field so arcane that there was, by his own admission, nobody else on his own world competent in it. “But it’s only new,” he said, which got him nowhere.

“If it’s new, share it with us, not with the propertarians!”

“I’ve tried to offer a course every quarter for a year now. You always say there isn’t enough demand for it. Are you afraid of it because it’s new?”

That won him no friends. He left them in anger.

He went on writing letters to Urras, even when he mailed none of them at all. The fact of writing for someone who might understand—who might have understood—made it possible for him to write, to think. Otherwise it was not possible.

The decads went by, and the quarters. Two or three times a year the reward came: a letter from Atro or another physicist in A-Io or Thu, a long letter, close-written, close-argued, all theory from salutation to signature, all intense abstruse metamathematical-ethico-cosmological temporal physics, written in a language he could not speak by men he did not know, fiercely trying to combat and destroy his theories, enemies of his homeland, rivals, strangers, brothers.

For days after getting a letter he was irascible and joyful, worked day and night, foamed out ideas like a fountain. Then slowly, with desperate spurts and struggles, he came back to earth, to dry ground, ran dry.

He was finishing his third year at the Institute when Gvarab died. He asked to speak at her memorial service, which was held, as the custom was, in the place where the dead person had worked: in this case one of the lecture rooms in the Physics laboratory building. He was the only speaker. No students attended; Gvarab had not taught for two years. A few elderly members of the Institute came, and Gvarab’s middle-aged son, an agricultural chemist from Northeast, was there. Shevek stood where the old woman had used to stand to lecture. He told these people, in a voice hoarsened by his now customary winter chest cold, that Gvarab had laid the foundations of the science of time, and was the greatest cosmologist who had ever worked at the Institute. “We in physics have our Odo now,” he said. “We have her, and we did not honor her.” Afterwards an old woman thanked him, with tears in her eyes. “We always took tenthdays together, her and me, janitoring in our block, we used to have such good times talking,” she said, wincing in the icy wind as they came out of the building. The agricultural chemist muttered civilities and hurried off to catch a ride back to Northeast. In a rage of grief, impatience, and futility, Shevek struck off walking at random through the city.

Three years here, and he had accomplished what? A book, appropriated by Sabul; five or six unpublished papers; and a funeral oration for a wasted life.