"On Unas, it means the place you go to when you're damned."
'That's a posting to Southwest in summer," said Terms, an ecologist, an old friend of Takver's.
"It's in the religious mode, in lotic."
"I know you have to read lotic, 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"
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streaked. He sat down heavily beside Shevek and panted*
"Say something in lotic," 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 lotic. "I don't really know how it's pronounced," he added, "I just guess."
"What did it mean?"
"// the passage of time ts 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 hasnt rained for eighteen decads. A hundred and eighty-three days to be precise. Longest drought in Abbenay for forty years."
"If it goes on, well have to recycle urine, the way they did in the Year 20. Glass of piss, Shev?"
"Dont 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 exotica from the Old World, drooped on their branches, dusty, curled by the dryness.
"Never be another Great Drought," Desar said,
"Modem 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
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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 windbome 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 Fve 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?"
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"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 alWhe
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 highroad of chronpsoph-ical thought in the Odonian Society has been a mutually agreed principle since the Settlement of Anarres. Egoistic divagation from this solidarity of principle 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 boots. 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, leam to set type, and do it."
"Paper's at minimum ration. No nonessential printing.
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Only PDC publications, tffl the tree-holum plantations are safe."
"Then can you change the presentation somehow? Disguise what you say. Decorate it with Sequency trimmings.
So that hell 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.'*