They were face to face now, but they had not touched.
“Is it what you need, then?”
“Yes. The bond. The chance.”
“Now—for life?”
“Now and for life.”
Life, said the stream of quick water down on the rocks in the cold dark.
On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of society.
Here on Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-indulgence. To be a physicist in A-Io was to serve…
While he got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its st…
But when a direction is chosen freely and followed wholeheartedly, it may seem that all things further the going. So the possibility and actuality of separation often served to strengthen the loyalty of partners. To maintain genuine spontaneous fidelity in a society that had no legal or moral sanct…
"[...] The baby, again, the animal, they don’t see the difference between what they do now and what will happen because of it. They can’t make a pulley, or a promise. We can. Seeing the difference between now and not now, we can make the connection. And there morality enters in. Responsibility. To …
