"That he kept getting kleggich postings, and moving around, and finally went to Segvina Island, didn't
he? And then Dap lost track of him."
"Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?"
"At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don't remember it, that's so long ago now. It was
silly. Witty Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that's right. This Urrasti hides himself in a
hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told
you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy
things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he's holding so many he
can't move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres.
And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she's just wide
open and ready, but he can't do it until he's given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn't
want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto
her, and then he'd leap up like he'd been bitten, saying, " must not! It is not moral! It is not good
business? Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive."
"He played the Urrasti?"
"Yes. He was marvelous."
"He showed me the play. Several times."
"Where did you meet him? In Grand Valley?"
"No, before, in Elbow. He was janitor for the mill."
"Had he chosen that?"
"I don't think Tir was able to choose at all, by then& Bedap always thought that he was forced to go
to Segvina, that he was bullied into asking for therapy. I don't know. When I saw him, several years after
therapy, he was a destroyed person."
"You think they did something at Segvina T
"I don't know; I think the Asylum does try to offer shelter, a refuge. To judge from their syndical
publications, they're at least altruistic. I doubt that they drove Tir over the edge."
"But what did break him, then? Just not finding a posting he wanted?"
"The play broke him."
"The play? The fuss those old turds made about it? Oh, but listen, to be driven crazy by that kind of
moralistic scolding you'd have to be crazy already. All he had to do was ignore itl"
"Tir was crazy already. By our society's standards."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I think Tir's a bora artist. Not a craftsman a creator. An inventor-destroyer, the kind who's
got to turn everything upside down and inside out. A satirist, a man " who praises through rage."
"Was the play that good?" Takver asked naively, coming out an inch or two from the blankets and
studying Shevek's profile.
"No, I don't think so. It must have been funny on stage. He was only twenty when he wrote it, after
all. He keeps writing it over. He's never written anything else."
"He keeps writing the same play?"
"He keeps writing the same play."
"Ugh," Takver said with pity and disgust
"Every couple of decads he'd come and show it to me. And I'd read it or make a show of reading it
and try to talk with him about it He wanted desperately to talk about it, but he couldn't He was too
frightened."
"Of what? I don't understand."
"Of me. Of everybody. Of the social organism, the human race, the brotherhood that rejected him.
When a man feels himself alone against all the rest, he might well be frightened."
"You mean, just because some people called his play immoral and said he shouldn't get a teaching
posting, he decided everybody was against him? That's a bit silly!"
"But who was for him?"
"Dap was all his friends."
"But he lost them. He got posted away."
"Why didn't he refuse the posting, then?"
"Listen, Takver. I thought the same thing, exactly. We always say that. You said it yon should have
refused to to to Rolny. I said it as soon as I got to Elbow: I'm a cee man, I didn't have to come here!&
We always think it, and say it, but we don't do it. We keep our initiative tucked away safe in our mind,
like a room where we can come and say, 'don't have to do anything, I make my own choices, I'm free.'
And then we leave the little room in our mind, and go where FDC posts us, and stay till " we're reposted."
"Oh, Shev, that's not true. Only since the drought. Before that there wasn't half so much posting.
People just worked up jobs where they wanted them, and joined a syndicate or formed one, and then
registered with Div-lab. Divlab mostly posted people who preferred to be in General Labor Fool. It's
going to go back to that again, now."
"I don't know. It ought to, of course. But even before the famine it wasnt going in that direction, but
away from it Bedap was right: every emergency, every labor draft even, tends to leave behind it an
increment of bureaucratic machinery within PDC, and a kind of rigidity: this is the " way it was done, this
is the way it is done, this is the way it has to be done& There was a lot of that, before the drought Five
years of stringent control may have fixed the pattern permanently. Don't look so skeptical! Listen, you tell
me, how many people do you know who refused to accept a posting even before the famine?"
Takver considered the question. "Leaving out nuchnibi?"
HNo, no. Nuchnibi are important."
"Well, several of Dap's friends that nice composer, Salas, and some of the scruffy ones too. And
real nuchnibi used to come through Round Valley when I was a kid. Only they cheated, I always thought
They told such lovely lies and stories, and told fortunes, everybody was glad to .see them and keep them
and feed them as long as they'd )stay. But they never would stay long. But then people would just pick
up and leave town, kids usually, some of them just hated farm work, and they'd just quit their posting and
leave. People do that everywhere, all the time. They move on, looking for something better. You just
don't call it refusing posting!"
"Why not?"
"What are you getting at?" Takver grumbled, retiring further under the blanket. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]