The midwife came back, went around putting things to rights. "You did a first-rate job," she remarked, to both of them. They assented mildly. "Ill look in in the rooming," she said leaving. The baby and Takver were already asleep. Shevek put his head down near Takver's. He was accustomed to the pleasant musky smell of her skin. This had changed; it had become a perfume, heavy and faint, heavy with sleep. Very gently he put one arm over her as she lay on her side with the baby against her breast In the room heavy with life he slept.
An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn't work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.
This was fully in accord with Odonian social theory. The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo's thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One's freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one's own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.
Many people felt that this idea of fidelity was misapplied to sexual life. Odo's femininity swayed her, they said, towards a refusal of real sexual freedom; here, if nowhere else, Odo did not write for men. As many women as men made this criticism, so it would appear that it was not masculinity that Odo failed to understand, but a whole type of section of humanity, people to whom experiment is the soul of sexual pleasure.
Though she may not have understood them, and probably considered them propertarian aberrations from the
197
norm—the human species being, if not a pair-bonding species, yet a time-binding one—still she provided better for the promiscuous than for those who tried long-term partnership. No law, no limit, no penalty, no punishment* no disapproval applied to any sexual practice of any kind, except the rape of a child or woman, for which the rapist's neighbors were likely to provide summary revenge if he did not get promptly into the gentler hands of a therapy center. But molestation was extremely rare in a society where complete fulfillment was the norm from puberty on, and the only social limit imposed on sexual activity was the mild one of pressure in favor of privacy, a kind of modesty imposed by the communality of life.
On the other hand, those who undertook to form and keep a partnership, whether homosexual or heterosexual, met with problems unknown to those content with sex wherever they found it They must face not only jealousy and possessiveness and the other diseases of passion for which monogamous union provides such a fine medium of growth, but also the external pressures of social organization. A couple that undertook partnership did so knowing that they might be separated at any time by the exigencies of labor distribution.
Divlab, the administration of the division of labor, tried to keep couples together, and to reunite them as soon as possible on request; but it could not always be done, especially in urgent levies, nor did anyone expect Divlab to remake whole lists and reprogram computers trying to do it. To survive, to make a go of life, an Anarresti knew he had to be ready to go where he was needed and do the work that needed doing. He grew up knowing labor distribution as a major factor of life, an immediate, permanent social necessity; whereas conjugality was a personal matter, a choice that could be made only within the larger choice.
But when a direction is chosen freely and followed whole-heartedly, 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 sanctions against infidelity, and to maintain it during voluntarily accepted separations that could come at any time and might last years, was something of a chal-
198
lenge. But the human being likes to be challenged, seeks freedom in adversity.
In the year 164 many people who had never sought it
got a taste of that kind of freedom, and liked it, liked the
sense of test and danger. The drought that began in the
summer of 163 met no relief in winter. By the summer
of 164 there was hardship, and the threat of disaster if the
drought went on.
Rationing was strict; labor drafts were imperative. The struggle to grow enough food and to get the food distributed became convulsive, desperate. Yet people were not desperate at alL Odo wrote: "A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for Joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole."
There was an undercurrent of joy, in that sense, in Abbenay that summer. There was a lightheartedness at work however hard the work, a readiness to drop all care as soon as what could be done had been done. The old tag of "solidarity" had come alive again. There is exhilaration in finding that the bond is stronger, after all, than all that tries the bond.
Early in the summer PDC put up posters suggesting that people shorten their working day by an hour or so, since the protein issue at commons was now insufficient for full normal expense of energy. The exuberant activity of the city streets had already been slowing down. People off work early loitered in the squares, played bowls in the dry parks, sat in workshop doorways and struck up conversation with passersby. The population of the city was visibly thinned, as several thousands had volunteered or been posted to emergency farm work. But mutual trust allayed depression or anxiety. "Well see each other through," they said, serenely. And great impulses of vitality ran just under the surface. When the wells in the northern suburbs failed, temporary mains from other districts were laid by volunteers working in their free time, skilled
199
and unskilled, adults and adolescents, and the job was done in thirty hours.
Late in summer Shevek was posted to an emergency farm draft to Red Springs community in Southrising. Ofc the promise of some rain that had fallen in the equatoriaT storm season, they were trying to get a crop of grain holum planted and reaped before the drought returned.
He had been expecting an emergency posting, since his construction Job was finished and he had listed himself as available in the general labor pooL All summer he had done nothing but teach his courses, read, go out on whatever volunteer calls came up in their block and in the city, and come home to Takver and the baby. Takver had gone back to her laboratory, mornings only, after five decads.
As a nursing mother she was entitled to both protein and
carbohydrate supplements at meals, and she always
availed herself of both; their friends could not share extra
food with her any more, there was no extra food. She
was thin but flourishing, and the baby was small but solid.
Shevek got a great deal of pleasure from the baby.
Having sole charge of her in the mornings (they left her in
the nursery only while be taught or did volunteer work). he felt that sense of being necessary which is the burden and reward of parenthood. An alert, responsive baby, she gave Shevek the perfect audience for his suppressed verbal fantasies, what Takver called his crazy streak. He would sit the baby on his knees and address wild cosmological lectures to her, explaining how time was actually space turned inside out, the chronon being thus the everted viscera of the quantum, and distance one of the accidental properties of light. He gave extravagant and ever-changing nicknames to the baby, and recited ridiculous mnemonics at her: Time is a manacle. Time is tyrannical, Supermechanical, Superorganical—TOPI—and at the pop, the baby arose a short distance into the air, squeaking and waving her fat fists. Both received great satisfaction from these exercises. When he received his posting it was a wrench. He had hoped for something close to Abbenay, not clear around in Southrising. But along with the unpleasant necessity of leaving Takver and the baby for sixty days came the steady assurance of coming back to them. So long as be had that, he had no complaints.