'That's good-1 thought you meant it distracted you." "Distracted! It's like an earthquake,"
"Thank you."
"It's not you," he said harshly- "It's me.*'
"That's what you think," she said.
There was a tongish pause.
"If you want to copulate," she said, "why havent you asked me?"
"Because I'm not sure that's what I do want."
"Neither am I." Her smile was gone. "Listen," she said.
Her voice was soft, and had not much timbre; it had the same furry quality as her eyes. "I ought to tell you." But
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what she ought to tell him remained unsaid for quite a while. He looked at her at last with such pleading apprehension that she hastened to speak, and said in a rush, "Well, all I mean is, I don't want to copulate with you
file:///F|/rah/Ursula%20LeGum/LeGum,%20Ursula%20K%20-%20The%20Dispossessed.txt now. Or anybody." /
"You've sworn off sex?"
"No!" she said with indignation, but no explanation.
"I might as well have," he said, flinging a pebble down into the stream. "Or else I'm impotent. It's been half a year, and that was just with Dap, Nearly a year, actually.
It kept getting more unsatisfying each time, till I quit trying. It wasn't worth it. Not worth the trouble. And yet I—I remember—I know what it ought to be."
"Well, that's it," said Takver. "I used to have an awful lot of fun copulating, until I was eighteen or nineteen. It was exciting, and interesting, and pleasure. But then ... I don't know. Like you said, it got unsatisfying. I didn't want pleasure. Not just pleasure. I mean."
"You want kids?"
"Yes, when the time comes.*'
He pitched another rock down into the stream, which was fading into the shadows of the ravine leaving only its noise behind, a ceaseless harmony composed of disharmonies.
"I want to get a job done," he said.
"Does being celibate help?"
"There's a connection. But I don't know what it is, it's not causal. About the time sex began to go sour on me, so did the work. Increasingly. Three years without getting anywhere. Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless, waste strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers. . . ."
Takver did not laugh; she gave a whimper of laughter, as though it hurt. He tried to make out her face clearly.
Behind her dark head the sky was hard and clear.
"What's wrong with pleasure, Takver? Why don't you want it?"
"Nothing's wrong with it. And I do want it- Only I dont need it And if I take what I don't need, I'll never get to what I do need."
"What is it you need?"
She looked down at the ground, scratching the surface
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of a rock outcrop with her fingernail. She said nothing.
She leaned forward to pick a sprig of moonthom, b« did not take it, merely touched it, felt the furred stem and fragile leaf. Shevek saw in the tension of her movements that she was trying with all her strength to contain or restrain a storm of emotion, so that she could speak. When she did, it was in a low voice and a little roughly. "I need
the bond," she said. "The real one. Body and mind and all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less."
She glanced up at him with defiance, it might have been hatred.
Joy was rising mysteriously in him, like the sound and smell of the running water rising through the darkness. He had a feeling of unlimitedness, of clarity, total clarity, as if he had been set free. Behind Takver's head the sky was brightening with moonrise; the far peaks floated clear and silver. "Yes, thafs it," he said, without self-consciousness, without any sense of talking to someone else; he said what came into his head, meditatively. "I never saw it."
There was a little resentment still in Takver's voice.
"You never had to see it"
"Why not?"
"I suppose because you never saw the possibility of it." *tWhat do you mean, the possibility?"
'The personi"
He considered this. They sat about a meter apart, hugging their knees because it was getting cold. Breath came to the throat like ice water. They could see each other's breath, faint vapor in the steadily growing moonlight.
"The night I saw it," Takver said, "was the night before you left Northsetting Institute. There was a party, you remember. Some of us sat and talked all night. But that was four years ago. And you didn't even know my name."
The rancor was gone from her voice; she seemed to want to excuse him.
"You saw in me, then, what I've seen in you this last four days?"
"I don't know. I can't tell. It wasn't Just sexual. I'd noticed you before, that way. This was different; I sew you.
But I don't know what you see now. And I didn't really know what I saw then. I didn't know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center. But you might have been quite different from what
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I thought you were. That wouldn't be your fault, after all," she added. "It's just that I knew what I saw in you was what I needed. Not Just wantedl"
"And you've been in Abbenay for two years, and didn't—"
"Didn't what? It was all on my side, in my head, you didn't even know my name. One person can't make a bond, after alll"
"And you were afraid that if you came to me I might not want the bond." "Not afraid. I knew you were a person who . .. wouldn't be forced. . .. Well. yes, I was afraid. I was afraid of you. Not of making a mistake. I knew it wasn't a mistake. But you were—yourself. You aren't like most people, you know. I was afraid of you because I knew you were my equal I" Her tone as she ended was fierce, but in a moment she said very gently, with kindness, "It doesn't really matter, you know, Shevek."
It was the first time he had heard her say his name. He turned to her and said stammering, almost choking,
"Doesn't matter? First you show me—you show me what matters, what really matters, what I've needed all my life —and then you say it doesn't matter!"
They were face to face now, but they had not touched.
"Is it what you need, then?"
"Yes. The bond. The chance."
"Now—for lifer'
"Now and for life."
Life, said the stream of quick water down on the rocks in the cold dark.
When Shevek and Takver came down from the mountains, they moved into a double room. None was free in the blocks near the Institute, but Takver knew of one not far away in an old domicile in the north end of town.
In order to get the room they went to the block housing manager—Abbenay was divided into about two hundred local administrative regions, called blocks—a lens grinder who worked at home and kept her three young children at home with her. She therefore kept the housing files in a shelf on top of a closet so the children wouldn't get at them. She checked that the room was registered as vacant;
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Shevek and Takver registered it as occupied by signing their names.
The move was not complicated, either. Shevek brought a box of papers, his winter boots, and the orange blanket. Takver had to make three trips. One was to the district clothing depository to get them both a new suit, an act which she felt obscurely but strongly was essential to beginning their partnership. Then she went to her old dormitory, once for her clothes and papers, and again, with Shevek, to bring a number of curious objects: complex concentric shapes made of wire, which moved and changed slowly and inwardly when suspended from the ceiling. She had made these with scrap wire and tools from the craft-supply depot, and called them Occupations of Uninhabited Space. One of the room's two chairs was decrepit, so they took it by a repair shop, where they picked up a sound one. They were then furnished. The new room had a high ceiling, which made it any and gave plenty of space for the Occupations. The domicile was built on one of Abbenay's low hills, and the room had a comer window that caught