Shevek did not do much of anything for a while. He did not consider himself ill; after the four years of famine everyone was so used to the effects of hardship and malnutrition that they took them as the norm. He had the dust cough that was endemic in southern desert communities, a chronic irritation of the bronchia similar to Silicosis and other miners’ diseases, but this was also something one took for granted where he had been living. He simply enjoyed the fact that if he felt like doing nothing, there was nothing he had to do.
For a few days he and Sherut shared the room daytimes, both of them sleeping till late afternoon; then She-rut, a placid woman of forty, moved in with another woman who worked night shift, and Shevek and Takver had the room to themselves for the four decads they stayed on in Chakar. While Takver was at work he slept, or walked out in the fields or on the dry, bare hills above the town. He went by the learning center late in the afternoon and watched Sadik and the other children on the playgrounds, or got involved, as adults often did, in one of the children’s projects — a group of mad seven-year-old carpenters, or a pair of sober twelve-year-old surveyors having trouble with triangulation. Then he walked with Sadik to the room; they met Takver as she got off work and went to the baths together and to commons. An hour or two after dinner he and Takver took the child back to her dormitory and returned to the room. The days were utterly peaceful, in the autumn sunlight, in the silence of the bills. It was to Shevek a time outside time, beside the flow, unreal, enduring, enchanted. He and Takver sometimes talked very late; other nights they went to bed not long after dark and slept nine hours, ten hours, in the profound, crystalline silence of the mountain night.
He had come with luggage: a tattered little fiberboard case, his name printed large on it in black ink; all Anarresti carried papers, keepsakes, the spare pair of boots, in the same kind of case when they .traveled, orange fiber-board, well scratched and dented. His contained a new shirt he had picked up as he came through Abbenay, a couple of books and some papers, and a curious object, which as it lay in the case appeared to consist of a series of flat loops of wire and a few glass beads. He revealed this, with some mystery, to Sadik, his second evening there.
“It’s a necklace,” the child said with awe. People in the small towns wore a good deal of jewelry. In sophisticated Abbenay there was more sense of the tension between the principle of nonownership and the impulse to self-adornment, and there a ring or pin was the limit of good taste. But elsewhere the deep connection between the aesthetic and the acquisitive was simply not worried about; people bedecked themselves unabashedly. Most districts had a professional jeweler who did his work for love and fame, as well as the craft shops, where you could make to suit your own taste with the modest materials offered — copper, silver, beads, spinels, and the garnets and yellow diamonds of Soutbrising. Sadik had not seen many bright, delicate things, but she knew necklaces, and so identified it.
“No: look,” her father said, and with solemnity and deftness raised the object by the thread that connected its several loops. Hanging from his hand it came alive, the loops turning freely, describing airy spheres one within the other, the glass beads catching the lamplight.
“Oh, beauty!” the child said. “What is it?”
“It hangs from the ceiling; is there a nail? The coat book will do, till I can get a nail from Supplies. Do you know who made it, Sadik?”
“No — You did.”
“She did. The mother. She did.” He turned to Takver. “It’s my favorite, the one that was over the desk. I gave the others to Bedap. I wasn’t going to leave them there for old what’s-her-name, Mother Envy down the corridor.”
“Oh — Bunub! I hadn’t thought of her in years!” Takver laughed shakily. She looked at the mobile as if she was afraid of it.
Sadik stood watching it as it turned silently seeking its balance. “I wish,” she said at last, carefully, “that I could share it one night over the bed I sleep in in the dormitory.”
“I’ll make one for you, dear soul. For every night.”
“Can you really make them, Takver?”
“Well, I used to. I think I could make you one,” The tears were now plain in Takver’s eyes. Shevek put his arms around her. They were both still on edge, overstrained. Sadik looked at them holding each other for a moment with a calm, observing eye, then returned to watching the Occupation of Uninhabited Space.
When they were alone, evenings, Sadik was often the, subject of their talk. Takver was somewhat overabsorbed in the child, for want of other intimacies, and her strong common sense was obscured by maternal ambitions and anxieties. This was not natural to her; neither competitiveness nor protectiveness was a strong motive in Anarresti life. She was glad to talk her worries out and get rid of them, which Shevek’s presence enabled her to do. The first nights, she did most of the talking, and he listened as he might have listened to music or to running; water, without trying to reply. He had not talked very much, for four years now; he was out of the habit of conversation. She released him from that silence, as she had always done. Later, it was he who talked the most, though always dependent on her response.
“Do you remember Tirin?” he asked one night It was cold; winter had arrived, and the room, the farthest from the domicile furnace, never got very warm, even with the register wide open. They had taken the bedding from both platforms and were well cocooned together on the platform nearer the register. Shevek was wearing a very old, much-washed shirt to keep his chest warm, as he liked to sit up in bed. Takver, wearing nothing, was under the blankets from the ears down. “What became of the orange blanket?” she said.
“What a propertarian! I left it,”
“To Mother Envy? How sad, I’m not a propertarian. I’m just sentimental. It was the first blanket we slept under.”
“No, it wasn’t We must have used a blanket up in the Ne Theras.”
“If we did, I don’t remember it” Takver laughed. “Who did you ask about?”
“Tirin.”
“Don’t remember.”
“At Northsetting Regional. Dark boy, snub nose—”
“Oh, Tirin! Of course. I was thinking of Abbenay.”
“I saw him, in Southwest.”
“You saw Tirin? How was he?”
Shevek said nothing for a while, tracing out the weave of the blanket with one finger. “Remember what Bedap told us about him?”
“That he kept getting kleggich postings, and moving around, and finally went to Segvina Island, didn’t he? And then Dap lost track of him.”
“Did you see the play he put on, the one that made trouble for him?”
“At the Summer Festival, after you left? Oh yes. I don’t remember it, that’s so long ago now. It was silly. Witty — Tirin was witty. But silly. It was about an Urrasti, that’s right. This Urrasti hides himself in a hydroponics tank on the Moon freighter, and breathes through a straw, and eats the plant roots. I told you it was silly! And so he gets himself smuggled onto Anarres. And then he runs around trying to buy things at depots, and trying to sell things to people, and saving gold nuggets till he’s holding so many he can’t move. So he has to sit where he is, and he builds a palace, and calls himself the Owner of Anarres. And there was an awfully funny scene where he and this woman want to copulate, and she’s just wide open and ready, but he can’t do it until he’s given her his gold nuggets first, to pay her. And she didn’t want them. That was funny, with her flopping down and waving her legs, and him launching himself onto her, and then he’d leap up like he’d been bitten, saying, ” must not! It is not moral! It is not good business? Poor Tirin! He was so funny, and so alive.”