He could not look on such work without trying to help in it. He could serve as handhold and brace when she needed leverage. They found this arrangement very quickly by trial and error, and kept to it after the midwife bad come in. Takver gave birth afoot, squatting, her face against Shevek’s thigh, her hands gripping his braced arms. “There you are,” the midwife said quietly under th hard, engine-like pounding of Takver’s breathing, and she took the slimy but recognizably human creature that had appeared. A gush of blood followed, and an amorphous mass of something not human, not alive. The terror he had forgotten came back into Shevek redoubled. It was death he saw. Takver had let go his arms and was huddled down quite limp at his feet. He bent over her, stiff with horror and grief.
“That’s it,” said the midwife, “help her move aside so I can clean this up.”
“I want to wash,” Takver said feebly.
“Here, help her wash up. Those are sterile cloths — there.”
“Waw, waw, waw,” said another voice.
The room seemed to be full of people.
“Now then,” the midwife said. “Here, get that baby back with her, at the breast, to help shut off the bloodflow. I want to get this placenta to the freezer in the clinic. I’ll be ten minutes.”
“Where is— Where is the—”
“In the crib!” said the midwife, leaving. Shevek located the very small bed, which had been standing ready in the corner for four decads, and the infant in it Somehow in this extreme rush of events the midwife had found time to clean the infant and even put a gown on it, so that it was not so fishlike and slippery as when he had seen it first. The afternoon had got dark, with the same peculiar rapidity and lack of time lapse. The lamp was on. Shevek picked up the baby to take it to Takver. Its face was incredibly small, with large, fragile-looking, closed eyelids. “Give it here,” Takver was saying. “Oh, do hurry up, please give it to me.”
He brought it across the room and very cautiously lowered it onto Takver’s stomach. “Ah!” she said softly, a call of pure triumph.
“What is it?” she asked after a while, sleepily.
Shevek was sitting beside her on the edge of the bed platform. He carefully investigated, somewhat taken aback by the length of gown as contrasted with the extreme shortness of limb, “Girl.”
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 morning,” 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 lelf-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 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 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 lest 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 fcowever 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.