“What’s your listing at Divlab?” he asked, puzzled.

“General labor pool.”

“But you’re skilled! You put in six or eight years at the Music Syndicate conservatory, didn’t you? Why don’t they post you to music teaching?”

“They did. I refused. I won’t be ready to teach for an-other ten years. I’m a composer, remember, not a performer.”

“But there must be postings for composers.”

“Where?”

“In the Music Syndicate, I suppose.”

“But the Music syndics don’t like my compositions. And nobody much else does, yet I can’t be a syndicate all by myself, can I?”

Salas was a bony little man, already bald on the upper face and cranium; he wore what was left of his hair short, in a silky beige fringe around the back of his neck and chin. His smile was sweet, wrinkling his expressive face. “You see, I don’t write the way I was trained to write at the conservatory. I write dysfunctional music.” He smiled more sweetly than ever. “They want chorales. I hate chorales. They want wide-harmony pieces like Sessur wrote. I hate Sessur’s music. I’m writing a piece of chamber music. Thought I might call it The Simultaneity Principle. Five instruments each playing an independent cyclic theme; no melodic causality; the forward process entirely in the relationship of the parts. It makes a lovely harmony. But they don’t hear it. They won’t hear it. They can’t!”

Shevek brooded a while. “If you called it The Joys of Solidarity,” he said, “would they hear it?”

“By damn!” said Bedap, who was listening in. “That’s the first cynical thing you ever said in your life, Shev. Welcome to the work crew!”

Salas laughed. “They’d give it a hearing, but they’d turn it down for taping or regional performance. It’s not in the Organic Style.”

“No wonder I never heard any professional music while I lived in Northsetting. But how can they justify this kind of censorship? You write music! Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we’re capable of. It’s certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it’s a sharing. The artist shares, it’s the essence of his act. No matter what your syndics say, how can Divlab justify not giving you a posting in your own field?”

“They don’t want to share it,” Salas said gleefully. “It scares ’em.”

Bedap spoke more gravely; “They can justify it because music isn’t useful. Canal digging is important, you know; music’s mere decoration. The circle has come right back around to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal, we’ve thrown it all away. We’ve gone right back to barbarism. If it’s new, run away from it; if you can’t eat it, throw it away!”

Shevek thought of his own work and had nothing to say. Yet he could not join in Bedap’s criticism. Bedap had forced him to realize that he was, in fact, a revolutionary; but he felt profoundly that he was such by virtue of his upbringing and education as an Odonian and an Anarresti. He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one’s soul.