the afternoon sunlight and gave a view of the city, the streets and squares, the roofs, the green of parks, the plains beyond.
Intimacy after long solitude, the abruptness of joy. tried both Shevek's stability and Takver's. In the first few decads he had wild swings of elation and anxiety; she had fits of temper. Both were oversensitive and inexperienced.
The strain did not last, as they became experts in each other. Their sexual hunger persisted as passionate delight, their desire for communion was daily renewed because it was daily fulfilled.
It was now clear to Shevek, and he would have thought it folly to think otherwise, that his wretched years in this city had all been part of hia present great happiness, because they had led up to it, prepared him for it. Everything that had happened to him was part of what was happening to him now, Takver saw no such obscure concatenations of effect/cause/effect, but then she was not a temporal physicist She saw time naively as a road laid out. You walked ahead, and you got somewhere. If you were lucky, you got somewhere worth getting to.
But when Shevek took her metaphor and recast it in his terms, explaining that, unless the past and the future were
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made part of the present by memory and intention, there was, in human terms, no road, nowhere to go, she nodded before he was half done. "Exactly," she said.
"That's what I was doing these last four years. It isnt all luck. Just partly."
She was twenty-three, a half year younger than Shevek.
She had grown up in a farming community. Round Valley, in Northeast. It was an isolated place, and before Takver had come to the Institute in Northsetting she had worked harder than most young Anarresti. There had been scarcely enough people in Round Valley to do the jobs that had to be done, but they were not a large enough community, or productive enough in the general economy, to get high priority from the Divlab computers. They had to look after themselves. Takver at eight had picked straw and rocks out of holum grain at the mill for three hours a day after three hours of school. Little of her practical training as a child had been towards personal enrichment: it had been part of the community's effort to survive. At harvest and planting seasons everyone over ten and under sixty had worked in the fields, all day. At fifteen she had been in charge of coordinating the work schedules on the four hundred farm plots worked by the community of Round Valley, and had assisted the planning dietician in the town refectory. There was nothing unusual in all this, and Takver thought little of it, but it had of course formed certain elements in her character and opinions. Shevek was glad he had done his share of kleggich, for Takver was contemptuous of people who evaded physical labor. "Look at Tinan," she would say, "whining and howling because he got a draft posting for four decads to a root-holum harvest. He's so delicate you'd think he was a fish egg! Has he ever touched dirt?" Takver was not particularly charitable, and she had a hot temper.
She had studied biology at Northsetting Regional Institute, with sufficient distinction that she had decided to come to the Central Institute for further study. After a year she had been asked to join in a new syndicate that was setting up a laboratory to study techniques of increasing and improving the edible fish stocks in the three oceans of Anarres. When people asked her what she did she said, "I'm a fish geneticist." She liked the work; it combined two things she valued: accurate, factual research
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and a specific goal of increase or betterment, ^thout such work she would not nave been satisfied. Bin ft by no means sufficed her. Most of what went on in Takver's mind and spirit had little to do with fish genetics.
Her concern with landscapes and living creatures wag passionate. This concern, feebly called "love of nature," seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut They never got weaned from the universe.
They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.
She showed Shevek the sea-water tanks at the research laboratory, fifty or more species of fish, large and small, drab and gaudy, elegant and grotesque. He was fascinated and a little awed.
The three oceans of Anarres were as full of animal life as the land was empty of it. The seas had not been connected for several million years, so their life forms had followed insular courses of evolution. Their variety was bewildering. It had never occurred to Shevek that life could proliferate so wildly, so exuberantly, that indeed exuberance was perhaps the essential quality of life.
On land, the plants got on well enough, in their sparse >and spiny fashion, but those animals that had tried air-breathing had mostly given up the project as the planet's Climate entered a millennial era of dust and dryness.
Bacteria survived, many of them lithophagous, and a few hundred species of worm and crustacean.
Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow ecology. If he fished, but not too greedily, and if he cultivated, using mainly organic wastes for fertilizer, he could fit in. But he could not fit anybody else in. There was no grass for herbivores. There were no herbivores for carnivores. There were no insects to fecundate flowering plants; the imported fruit trees were all hand-fertilized. No animals were introduced from Urras to imperil the delicate balance of life, only the settlers came, and so well scrubbed internally and externally that they brought a minimum of their personal fauna and flora with them.
Not even the flea had made it to Anarres.
"I like marine biology," Takver said to Shevek in front
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of the fish tanks, "because it's so complex, a real web.
This fish eats that fish eats small fry eat ciliates eat bacteria and round you go. On land, there's only three phyla, all nonchordates—if you don't count man. It's a queer situation, biologically speaking. We Anarresti are unnaturally isolated. On the Old World there are eighteen phyla of land animal; there are classes, like the insects, that have so many species they've never been able to count them, and some of those species have populations of billions. Think of it: everywhere you looked animals, other creatures, sharing the earth and air with you. You'd feel so much more a part.'* Her gaze followed the curve of a small blue fish's flight through the dim tank. Shevek, intent, followed the fish's track and her thought's track. He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist's arrogance to those small strange lives, to the existence of beings to whom the present is eternal, beings that do not explain themselves and need not ever justify their ways to man.
Most Anarresti worked five to seven hours a day, with two to four days off each decad. Details of regularity, punctuality, which days off, and so on were worked out between the individual and his work crew or gang or syndicate or coordinating federative, on whichever level cooperation and efficiency could best be achieved. Takver ran her own research projects, but the work and the fish had their own imperative demands; she spent from two to ten hours a day at the laboratory, no days off. Shevek had two teaching posts now, an advanced math course in a learning center and another at the Institute. Both courses were in the morning, and he got back to the room by noon. Usually Takver was not back yet The building was quite silent. The sunlight had not yet worked round to the double window that looked south and west over the city and the plains; the room was cool and shadowed. The delicate concentric mobiles hanging at different levels overhead moved with the introverted precision, silence, mystery of the organs of the body or the processes of the reasoning mind. Shevek would sit down at the table under the windows and begin to work, reading or making notes or calculating. Gradually the sunlight entered, shifted across the papers on the table, across his hands on the