The Dispossessed (Hainish Cycle, #6)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

What facts he had, he used, but it was not fact that lent him his certainty.

This room was evidently for his sole use, as it opened off the bedroom, and contained only one of each kind of fixture, though each was of a sensuous luxury that far surpassed mere eroticism and partook, in Shevek’s view, of a kind of ultimate apotheosis of the excremental.

The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer, and his sons are born in exile.

So many such discoveries had been forced on him during his first half year in Abbenay that he had to realize that he had been—and possibly still was?—very naïve: not an easy admission for an intelligent young man to make.

Shevek’s readings in Urrasti history led him to decide that they were, in fact, though the word was seldom used these days, aristocrats. In feudal times the aristocracy had sent their sons to university, conferring superiority on the institution. Nowadays it was the other way round: the university conferred superiority on the man. They told Shevek with pride that the competition for scholarships to Ieu Eun was stiffer every year, proving the essential democracy of the institution. He said, “You put another lock on the door and call it democracy.”

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream.

But the fact was that he liked Bedap more as a man than he ever had as a boy. Inept, insistent, dogmatic, destructive: Bedap could be all that; but he had attained a freedom of mind that Shevek craved, though he hated its expression.

Shevek liked the prospect of ten days in the mountains, but not the prospect of ten days of Bedap’s opinions.

Takver, like any man or woman who undertakes companionship of the creator spirit, did not always have an easy time of it. Although her existence was necessary to Shevek her actual presence could be a distraction.

“What is the ansible?” “It’s what he’s calling an instantaneous communication device. He says if the temporalists—that’s you, of course—will just work out the time inertia equations, the engineers—that’s him—will be able to build the damned thing, test it, and thus incidentally prove the validity of the theory, within months or weeks.” “Engineers are themselves proof of the existence of causal reversibility. You see Reumere has his effect built before I have provided the cause.”

Pae was a very clever physicist. Or, more exactly, he was very clever about physics. He had not done anything original, but his opportunism, his sense for where advantage lay, led him time after time to the most promising field.

“I haven’t accepted it, Tuio. I’m not going to let my face get knocked in or my brains blown out by the black-coats. If they hurt me, I’ll hurt back.” “Join them, if you like their methods. Justice is not achieved by force!” “And power isn’t achieved by passivity.” “We are not seeking power. We are seeking the end of power! What do you say?” Maedda appealed to Shevek. “The means are the end. Odo said it all her life. Only peace brings peace, only just acts bring justice! We cannot be divided on that on the eve of action!”

Somebody had told Bedap that Rulag was an engineer, and he had found in her the engineer’s clarity and pragmatism of mind, plus the mechanist’s hatred of complexity and irregularity.