“For God’s sake!” Vea said, looking down at her skirt in the dim light, twitching the pleats away from her. “Really! Now I’ll have to change my dress.”
Shevek stood, his mouth open, breathing with difficulty, his hands hanging; then all at once he turned and blundered out of the dim room. Back in the bright room of the party he stumbled through the crowded people, tripped over a leg, found his way blocked by bodies, clothes, jewels, breasts, eyes, candle flames, furniture. He ran up against a table. On it lay a silver platter on which tiny pastries stuffed with meat, cream, and herbs were arranged in concentric circles like a huge pale flower. Shevek gasped for breath, doubled up, and vomited all over the platter.
“I’ll take him home,” Pae said.
“Do, for heaven’s sake,” said Vea “Were you looking for him, Saio?”
“Oh, a bit. Fortunately Demaere called you.”
“You are certainly welcome to him.”
“He won’t be any trouble. Passed out in the hall. May I use your phone before I go?”
“Give my love to the Chief,” Vea said archly.
Oiie had come to his sister’s flat with Pae, and left with him. They sat in the middle seat of the big Government limousine that Pae always had on call, the same one that had brought Shevek from the space port last summer. He now lay as they had dumped him on the back seat.
“Was he with your sister all day, Demaere?”
“Since noon, apparently.”
“Thank God!”
“Why are you so worried about his getting into the slums? Any Odonian’s already convinced we’re a lot of oppressed wage slaves, what’s the difference if he sees a bit of corroboration?”
“I don’t care what he sees. We don’t want him seen. Have you been reading the birdseed papers? Or the broad-sheets that were circulating last week in Old Town, about the ‘Forerunner’? The myth—the one who comes before the millennium—‘a stranger, an outcast, an exile, bearing in empty hands the time to come.’ They quoted that. The rabble are in one of their damned apocalyptic moods. Looking for a figurehead. A catalyst. Talking about a general strike. They’ll never learn. They need a lesson all the same. Damned rebellious cattle, send them to fight Thu, it’s the only good we’ll ever get from them.”
Neither man spoke again during the ride.
The night watchman of the Senior Faculty House helped them get Shevek up to his room. They loaded him onto the bed. He began to snore at once.
Oiie stayed to take off Shevek’s shoes and put a blanket over him. The drunken man’s breath was foul; Oiie stepped away from the bed, the fear and the love he felt for Shevek rising up in him, each strangling the other. He scowled, and muttered, “Dirty fool.” He snapped the light off and returned to the other room. Pae was standing at the desk going through Shevek’s papers.
“Leave off,” Oiie said, his expression of disgust deepening. “Come on. It’s two in the morning. I’m tired.”
“What has the bastard been doing, Demaere? Still nothing here, absolutely nothing. Is he a complete fraud? Have we been taken in by a damned naive peasant from Utopia? Where’s his theory? Where’s our instantaneous spaceflight? Where’s our advantage over the Hainish? Nine, ten months we’ve been feeding the bastard, for nothing!” Nevertheless he pocketed one of the papers before he followed Oiie to the door.
8THEY were out on the athletic fields of Abbenay’s North Park, six of them, in the long gold and heat and dust of the evening. They were all pleasantly replete, for dinner had gone on most of the afternoon, a street festival and feast with cooking over open fires. It was the midsummer holiday, Insurrection Day, commemorating the first great uprising in Nio Esseia in the Urrasti year 740, nearly two hundred years ago. Cooks and refectory workers were honored as the guests of the rest of the community on that day, because a syndicate of cooks and waiters had begun the strike that led to the insurrection. There were many such traditions and festivals on Anarres, some instituted by the Settlers and others, like the harvest homes and the Feast of the Solstice, that had risen spontaneously out of the rhythms of life on the planet and the need of those who work together to celebrate together.
They were talking, all rather desultorily except for Takver. She had danced for hours, eaten quantities of fried bread and pickles, and was feeling very lively. “Why did Kvigot get posted to the Keran Sea fisheries, where he’ll have to start all over again, while Turib takes on his research program here?” she was saying. Her research syndicate had been assimilated into a project managed directly by PDC, and she had become a strong partisan of some of Bedap’s ideas. “Because Kvigot is a good biologist who doesn’t agree with Simas’s fuddy-duddy theories, and Turib is a nothing who scrubs Simas’s back in the baths. See who takes over directing the program when Simas retires. She will, Turib will, I’ll bet you!”
“What does that expression mean?” asked somebody who felt indisposed for social criticism.
Bedap, who had been puffing on weight at the waist and was serious about exercise, was trotting earnestly around the playing field. The others were sitting on a dusty bank under trees, getting their exercise verbally.
“It’s an Iotic verb,” Shevek said. “A game the Urrasti play with probabilities. The one who guesses right gets the other one’s property.” He had long ago ceased to observe Sabul’s ban on mentioning his Iotic studies.
“How did one of their words get into Pravic?”
“The Settlers,” said another. “They had to learn Pravic as adults; they must have thought in the old languages for a long time. I read somewhere that the word damn isn’t in the Pravic Dictionary—it’s Iotic too. Farigv didn’t provide any swear words when he invented the language, or if he did his computers didn’t understand the necessity.”
“What’s hell, then?” Takver asked. “I used to think it meant the shit depot in the town where I grew up. ‘Go to hell!’ The worst place to go.”
Desar, the mathematician, who had now taken a permanent posting to the Institute staff, and who still hung around Shevek, though he seldom spoke to Takver, said in his cryptographic style, “Means Urras.”
“On Urras, it means the place you go to when you’re damned.”
“That’s a posting to Southwest in summer,” said Terrus, an ecologist, an old friend of Takver’s.
“It’s in the religious mode, in Iotic.”
“I know you have to read Iotic, Shev, but do you have to read religion?”
“Some of the old Urrasti physics is all in the religious mode. Concepts like that come up. ‘Hell’ means the place of absolute evil.”
“The manure depot in Round Valley,” Takver said. “I thought so.”
Bedap came pumping up, dust-whitened, sweat-streaked. He sat down heavily beside Shevek and panted.
“Say something in Iotic,” asked Richat, a student of Shevek’s. “What does it sound like?”
“You know: Hell! Damn!”
“But stop swearing at me,” said the girl, giggling, “and say a whole sentence.”
Shevek good-naturedly said a sentence in Iotic. “I don’t really know how it’s pronounced,” he added, “I just guess.”
“What did it mean?”
“If the passage of time is a feature of human consciousness, past and future are functions of the mind. From a pre-Sequentist, Keremcho.”
“How weird to think of people speaking and you couldn’t understand them!”
“They can’t even understand each other. They speak hundreds of different languages, all the crazy archists on the Moon…”
“Water, water,” said Bedap, still panting.
“There is no water,” said Terrus. “It hasn’t rained for eighteen decads. A hundred and eighty-three days to be precise. Longest drought in Abbenay for forty years.”
“If it goes on, we’ll have to recycle urine, the way they did in the Year 20. Glass of piss, Shev?”
“Don’t joke,” said Terrus. “That’s the thread we walk on. Will it rain enough? The leaf
crops in Southrising are a dead loss already. No rain there for thirty decads.”
They all looked up into the hazy, golden sky. The serrated leaves of the trees under which they sat, tall exotics from the Old World, dropped on their branches, dusty, curled by the dryness.
“Never be another Great Drought,” Desar said. “Modern desalinization plants. Prevent.”
“They might help alleviate it,” Terrus said.
Winter that year came early, cold, and dry in the Northern Hemisphere. Frozen dust on the wind in the low, wide streets of Abbenay. Water to the baths strictly rationed: thirst and hunger outranked cleanliness. Food and clothing for the twenty million people of Anarres came from the holum plants, leaf, seed, fiber, root. There was some stockpile of textiles in the warehouses and depots, but there had never been much reserve of food. Water went to the land, to keep the plants alive. The sky over the city was cloudless and would have been clear, but it was yellowed with dust windborne from drier lands to the south and west. Sometimes when the wind blew down from the north, from the Ne Theras, the yellow haze cleared and left a brilliant, empty sky, dark blue hardening to purple at the zenith.
Takver was pregnant. Mostly she was sleepy and benign. “I am a fish,” she said, “a fish in water. I am inside the baby inside me.” But at times she was overtaxed by her work, or left hungry by the slightly decreased meals at commons. Pregnant women, like children and old people, could get a light extra meal daily, lunch at eleven, but she often missed this because of the exacting schedule of her work. She could miss a meal, but the fish in her laboratory tanks could not. Friends often brought by something saved out from their dinner or left over at their commons, a filled bun or a piece of fruit. She ate all gratefully but continued to crave sweets, and sweets were in short supply. When she was tired she was anxious and easily upset, and her temper flared at a word.
Late in the autumn Shevek completed the manuscript of the Principles of Simultaneity. He gave it to Sabul for approval for the press. Sabul kept it for a decad, two decads, three decads, and said nothing about it. Shevek asked him about it. He replied that he had not yet got around to reading it, he was too busy. Shevek waited. It was midwinter. The dry wind blew day after day; the ground was frozen. Everything seemed to have come to a halt, an uneasy halt, waiting for rain, for birth.
The room was dark. The lights had just come on in the city; they looked weak under the high, dark-grey sky. Takver came in, lit the lamp, crouched down in her overcoat by the heat grating. “Oh it’s cold! Awful. My feet feel like I’ve been walking on glaciers, I nearly cried on the way home they hurt so. Rotten profiteering boots! Why can’t we make a decent pair of boots? What are you sitting in the dark for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you go to commons? I got a bite at Surplus on the way home. I had to stay, the kukuri eggs were hatching and we had to get the fry out of the tanks before the adults ate them. Did you eat?”
“No.”
“Don’t be sulky. Please don’t be sulky tonight. If one more thing goes wrong, I’ll cry. I’m sick of crying all the time. Damned stupid hormones! I wish I could have babies like the fish, lay the eggs and swim off and that’s the end of it. Unless I swam back and ate them…Don’t sit and look like a statue like that I just can’t stand it.” She was slightly in tears, as she crouched by the breath of heat from the grating, trying to unfasten her boots with stiff fingers.
Shevek said nothing.
“What is it? You can’t just sit there!”
“Sabul called me in today. He won’t recommend the Principles for publication, or export.”
Takver stopped struggling with the bootlace and sat still. She looked at Shevek over her shoulder. At last she said, “What did he say exactly?”
“The critique he wrote is on the table.”
She got up, shuffled over to the table wearing one boot, and read the paper, leaning over the table, her hands in her coat pockets.
“‘That Sequency Physics is the high road of chronosophical thought in the Odonian Society has been a mutually agreed principle since the Settlement of Anarres. Egoistic divagation from this solidarity of principles can result only in sterile spinning of impractical hypotheses without social organic utility, or repetition of the superstitious-religious speculations of the irresponsible hired scientists of the Profit States of Urras…’ Oh, the profiteer! The petty-minded, envious little Odo-spouter! Will he send this critique to the Press?”
“He’s done so.”
She knelt to wrestle off her boot. She glanced up several times at Shevek, but she did not go to him or try to touch him, and for some while she did not say anything. When she spoke her voice was not loud and strained as before, but had its natural husky, furry quality. “What will you do, Shev?”
“There’s nothing to do.”
“We’ll print the book. Form a printing syndicate, learn to set type, and do it.”
“Paper’s at minimum ration. No nonessential printing. Only PDC publications, till the tree-holum plantations are safe.”
“Then can you change the presentation somehow? Disguise what you say. Decorate it with Sequency trimmings. So that he’ll accept it.”
“You can’t disguise black as white.”
She did not ask if he could bypass Sabul or go over his head. Nobody on Anarres was supposed to be over anybody’s head. There were no bypasses. If you could not work in solidarity with your syndics, you worked alone.
“What if…” She stopped. She got up and put her boots by the heater to dry. She took off her coat, hung it up, and put a heavy hand-loomed shawl over her shoulders. She sat down on the bed platform, grunting a little as she lowered herself the last few inches. She looked up at Shevek, who sat in profile between her and the windows.
“What if you offered to let him sign as co-author? Like the first paper you wrote.”
“Sabul won’t put his name to ‘superstitious-religious speculations.’”
“Are you sure? Are you sure that isn’t just what he wants? He knows what this is, what you’ve done. You’ve always said he’s shrewd. He knows it’ll put him and the whole Sequency school in the recycle bin. But if he could share with you, share the credit? All he is, is ego. If he could say that it was his book…”
Shevek said bitterly, “I’d as soon share you with him as that book.”
“Don’t look at it that way, Shev. It’s the book that’s important—the ideas. Listen. We want to keep this child to be born with us as a baby, we want to love it. But if for some reason it would die if we kept it, it could only live in a nursery, if we never could set eyes on it or know its name—if we had that choice, which would we choose? To keep the stillborn? Or to give life?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He put his head in his hands, rubbing his forehead painfully. “Yes, of course. Yes. But this—But I—”
“Brother, dear heart,” Takver said. She clenched her hands together on her lap, but she did not reach out to him. “It doesn’t matter what name is on the book. People will know. The truth is the book.”
“I am that book,” he said. Then he shut his eyes, and sat motionless. Takver went to him then, timidly, touching him as gently as if she touched a wound.
Early in the year 164 the first, incomplete, drastically edited version of the Principles of Simultaneity was printed in Abbenay, with Sabul and Shevek as joint authors. PDC was printing only essential records and directives, but Sabul had influence at the Press and in the Information division of PDC, and had persuaded them of the propaganda value of the book abroad. Urras, he said, was rejoicing over the drought and possible famine on Anarres; the last shipment of Ioti journals was full of gloating prophecies of the imminent collapse of the Odonian economy. What better denial, said Sabul, than the publication of a major work of pure thought, “a monument of science,” he said in his revised critique, “soaring above material adversity to prove the unquenchable vitality of the Odonian Society and its triumph over archist propertarianism
in every area of human thought.”
So the work was printed; and fifteen of the three hundred copies went aboard the Ioti freighter Mindful. Shevek never opened a copy of the printed book. In the export packet, however, he put a copy of the original, complete manuscript, handwritten. A note on the cover asked that it be given to Dr. Atro of the College of the Noble Science of Ieu Eun University, with the compliments of the author. It was certain that Sabul, who gave final approval to the packet, would notice the addition. Whether he took the manuscript out or left it in, Shevek did not know. He might confiscate it out of spite; he might let it go, knowing that his emasculated abridgment would not have the desired effect on Urrasti physicists. He said nothing about the manuscript to Shevek. Shevek did not ask about it.
Shevek said very little to anyone, that spring. He took on a volunteer posting, construction work on a new water-recycling plant in South Abbenay, and was away at that work or teaching most of the day. He returned to his studies in subatomics, often spending evenings at the Institute’s accelerator or the laboratories with the particle specialists. With Takver and their friends he was quiet, sober, gentle, and cold.
Takver got very big in the belly and walked like a person carrying a large, heavy basket of laundry. She stayed at work at the fish labs till she had found and trained an adequate replacement for herself, then she came home and began labor, more than a decad past her time. Shevek arrived home in midafternoon. “You might go fetch the midwife,” Takver said. “Tell her the contractions are four or five minutes apart, but they’re not speeding up much, so don’t hurry very much.”
He hurried, and when the midwife was out, he gave way to panic. Both the midwife and the block medic were out, and neither had left a note on the door saying where they could be found, as they usually did. Shevek’s heart began pounding in his chest, and he saw things suddenly with a dreadful clarity. He saw that this absence of help was an evil omen. He had withdrawn from Takver since the winter, since the decision about the book. She had been increasingly quiet, passive, patient. He understood that passivity now: it was a preparation for her death. It was she who had withdrawn from him, and he had not tried to follow her. He had looked only at his own bitterness of heart, and never at her fear, or courage. He had let her alone because he wanted to be let alone, and so she had gone on, gone far, too far, would go on alone, forever.
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