“What does that expression mean?” asked somebody who felt indisposed for social criticism.
Bedap, who had been putting on weight at the waist and was serious about exercise, was trotting earnestly around the playing field. The others were sitting on a dusty bank under trees, getting their exercise verbally.
“It’s an Iotic verb,” Shevek said. “A game the Urrasti play with probabilities. The one who guesses right gets the other one’s property.” He had long ago ceased to observe Sabul’s ban on mentioning his Iotic studies.
“How did one of their words get into Pravic?”
“The Settlers,” said another. “They had to learn Pravic as adults; they must have thought in the old languages for a long time. I read somewhere that the word damn isn’t in the Pravic Dictionary — it’s Iotic too. Farigv didnt provide any swearwords when he invented the language, or if he did his computers didn’t understand the necessity.”
“What’s hell, then?” Takver asked. “I used to think it meant the shit depot in the town where I grew up. ‘Go to hell!’ The worst place to go.”
Desar, the mathematician, who had now taken a permanent posting to the Institute staff, and who still hung around Shevek, though he seldom spoke to Takver, said in his cryptographic style, “Means Urras.”
“On Urras, it means the place you go to when you’re damned.”
“That’s a posting to Southwest in summer,” said Terras, an ecologist, an old friend of Takver’s.
“It’s in the religious mode, in Iotic.”
“I know you have to read Iotic, 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 streaked. He sat down heavily beside Shevek and panted.
“Say something in Iotic,” 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 Iotic. “I don’t really know how it’s pronounced,” he added, “I just guess.”
“What did it mean?”
“// the passage of time is 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 Terms. “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, we’ll have to recycle urine, the way they did in the Year 20. Glass of piss, Shev?”
“Don’t joke,” said Terras. “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 exotics from the Old World, drooped on their branches, dusty, curled by the dryness.
“Never be another Great Drought,” Desar said, “Modern desalinization plants. Prevent.”
“They might help alleviate it,” Terms 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 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 windborne 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 I’ve been walking on glaciers, I nearly cried on the way home they hurt so. Rotten profiteering boots! Why cant 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?”
“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 all the 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 chronosoph-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?”