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REVOLUTION IN BENBILI! DICTATOR FLEES!
REBEL LEADERS HOLD CAPITAL! EMERGENCY
SESSION IN CWG. POSSIBILITY A-IO MAY
INTERVENE.
The birdseed paper was excited into its hugest typeface. Spelling and grammar fell by the wayside; it
read like Efor talking: "By last night rebels hold all west of Meskti and pushing army hard& " It was the
verbal mode of the Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged unstable present tense.
Shevek read the papers and looked up a description of Benbili in the CWG Encyclopedia. The nation
was in form a parliamentary democracy, in fact a military dictatorship, run by generals. It was a large
country in the western hemisphere, mountains and arid savannahs, underpopulated, poor. "I should have
gone to Benbili," Shevek thought, for the idea of it drew him; he imagined pale plains, the wind blowing.
The news had stirred him strangely. He listened for bulletins on the radio, which he had seldom turned on
after finding that its basic function was advertising things for sale. Its reports, and those of the official
telefax in public rooms, were brief and dry: a queer contrast to the popular papers, which shouted
Revolution! on every page.
General Havevert, the President, got away safe in his famous armored airplane, but some lesser
generals were caught and emasculated, a punishment the Benbili traditionally preferred to execution. The
retreating army burned the fields and towns of their people as they went. Guerrilla partisans harried the
army. The revolutionaries in Meskti, the capital, opened the jails, giving amnesty to all prisoners. Reading
that, Shevek's heart leapt. There was hope, there was still hope& He followed the news of the distant
revolution with increasing intensity. On the fourth day, watching a telefax broadcast of debate in the
Council of World Governments, he saw the Ioti ambassador to the CWG announce that A-Io, rising to
the support of the democratic government of Benbili, was sending armed reinforcements to
President-General Havevert
The Benbili revolutionaries were mostly not even armed. The Ioti troops would come with guns,
armored cars, airplanes, bombs. Shevek read the description of their equipment in the paper and felt sick
at his stomach.
He felt sick and enraged, and there was nobody he could talk to. Pae was out of the question. Atro
was an ardent militarist. Oiie was an ethical man, but his private insecurities, his anxieties as a property
owner, made him cling to rigid notions of law and order. He could cope with his personal liking for
Shevek only by refusing to admit that Shevek was an anarchist. The Odonian society called itself
anarchistic, he said, but they were in fact mere primitive populists whose social order functioned without
apparent government because there were so few of them and because they had no neighbor states.
When their property was threatened by an aggressive rival, they would either wake up to reality or be
wiped out. The Benbili rebels were waking up to reality now: they were finding freedom is no good if you
have no guns to back it up. He explained this to Shevek in the one discussion they had on the subject. It
did not matter who governed, or thought they governed, the Benbilis; the politics of reality concerned the
power struggle between A-Io and Thu.
"The politics of reality," Shevek repeated. He looked at Oiie and said, "That is a curious phrase for a
physicist to use."
"Not at all. The politician and the physicist both deal with things as they are, with real forces, the basic
laws of the world."
"You put your petty miserable 'laws' to protect wealth, your 'forces' of guns and bombs, in the same
sentence with the law of entropy and the force of gravity? I had thought better of your mind, Demaere!"
Oiie shrank from that thunderbolt of contempt. He said no more, and Shevek said no more, but Oiie
never forgot it. It lay imbedded in his mind thereafter as the most shameful moment of his life. For if
Shevek the deluded and simple-minded utopist had silenced him so easily, that was shameful; but if
Shevek the physicist and the man whom he could not help liking, admiring, so that he longed to deserve
his respect, as if it were somehow a finer grade of respect than any currently available elsewhere if this
Shevek despised him, then the shame was intolerable, and he must hide it, lock it away the rest of his life
in the darkest room of his soul.
The subject of the Benbili revolution had sharpened certain problems for Shevek also: particularly the
problem of his own silence.
It was difficult for him to distrust the people he was with. He had been brought up in a culture that
relied deliberately and constantly on human solidarity, mutual aid. Alienated as he was in some ways from
that culture, and alien as he was to this one, still the lifelong habit remained: he assumed people would be
helpful. He trusted them.
But Chifoilisk's warnings, which he had tried to dismiss, kept returning to him. His own perceptions
and instincts reinforced them. Like it or not, he must learn distrust. He must be silent; he must keep his
property to himself, he must keep his bargaining power.
He said little, these days, and wrote down less. His desk was a moraine of insignificant papers; his
few working notes were always right on his body, in one of his numerous Urrasti pockets. He never left
his desk computer without clearing it.
He knew that he was very near achieving the General Temporal Theory that the Ioti wanted so badly
for their spaceflight and their prestige. He knew also that he had not achieved it and might never do so.
He had never admitted either fact clearly to anyone.
Before he left Anarres, he had thought the thing was in his grasp. He had the equations. Sabul knew
he had them, and had offered him reconciliation, recognition, in return for the chance to print them and
get in on the glory. He had refused Sabul, but it had not been a grand moral gesture. The moral gesture, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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