They started up into the mountains.

In the cold evening of the fourth day of their excursion he and Takver sat on the bare steep slope above a gorge. Forty meters below them a mountain torrent rattled down the ravine among spraywet rocks. There was little running water on Anarres; the water table was low in most places, rivers were short. Only in the mountains were there quick-running streams. The sound of water shouting and clattering and singing was new to them.

They had been scrambling up and down such gorges all day in the high country and were leg-weary. The rest of their party were in the Wayshelter, a stone lodge built by and for vacationers, and well kept up; the Ne Theras Federative was the most active of the volunteer groups that managed and protected the rather limited “scenic” areas of Anarres. A firewarden who lived there in summer was helping Bedap and the others put together a dinner from the well-stocked pantries. Takver and Shevek had gone out, in that order, separately, without announcing their destination or, in fact, knowing it.

He found her on the steep slope, sitting among the delicate bushes of moonthorn that grew like knots of lace over the mountainsides, its stiff, fragile branches silvery in the twilight. In a gap between eastern peaks a colorless luminosity of the sky heralded moonrise. The stream was noisy in the silence of the high, bare hills. There was no wind, no cloud. The air above the mountains was like amethyst, hard, clear, profound.

They had been sitting there some while without speaking.

“I’ve never been drawn to a woman in my life as I have been to you. Ever since we started this hike.” Shevek’s tone was cold, almost resentful.

“I didn’t mean to spoil your vacation,” she said, with her large childish laugh, too loud for the twilight.

“It doesn’t spoil it!”

“That’s good. I thought you meant it distracted you.”

“Distracted! It’s like an earthquake.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s not you,” he said harshly. “It’s me.”

“That’s what you think,” she said.

There was a longish pause.

“If you want to copulate,” she said, “why haven’t you asked me?”

“Because I’m not sure that’s what I do want.”

“Neither am I.” Her smile was gone. “Listen,” she said. Her voice was soft, and had not much timbre; it had the same furry quality as her eyes. “I ought to tell you.” But what she ought to tell him remained unsaid for quite a while. He looked at her at last with such pleading apprehension that she hastened to speak, and said in a rush, “Well, all I mean is, I don’t want to copulate with you now. Or anybody.”

“You’ve sworn off sex?”

“No!” she said with indignation, but no explanation.

“I might as well have,” he said, flinging a pebble down into the stream. “Or else I’m impotent. It’s been half a year, and that was just with Dap. Nearly a year, actually. It kept getting more unsatisfying each time, till I quit trying. It wasn’t worth it. Not worth the trouble. And yet I — I remember — I know what it ought to be.”

“Well, that’s it,” said Takver. “I used to have an awful lot of fun copulating, until I was eighteen or nineteen. It was exciting, and interesting, and pleasure. But then… I don’t know. Like you said, it got unsatisfying. I didn’t want pleasure. Not just pleasure. I mean.”

“You want kids?”

“Yes, when the time comes.”

He pitched another rock down into the stream, which was fading into the shadows of the ravine leaving only its noise behind, a ceaseless harmony composed of disharmonies.

“I want to get a job done,” he said.

“Does being celibate help?”

“There’s a connection. But I don’t know what it is, it’s not causal. About the time sex began to go sour on me, so did the work. Increasingly. Three years without getting anywhere. Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless, waste strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers…”

Takver did not laugh; she gave a whimper of laughter, as though it hurt. He tried to make out her face clearly. Behind her dark head the sky was hard and clear.

“What’s wrong with pleasure, Takver? Why don’t you want it?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it. And I do want it. Only I don’t need it. And if I take what I don’t need, I’ll never get to what I do need.”

“What is it you need?”

She looked down at the ground, scratching the surface of a rock outcrop with her fingernail. She said nothing. She leaned forward to pick a sprig of moonthorn, but did not take it, merely touched it, felt the furred stem and fragile leaf. Shevek saw in the tension of her movements that she was trying with all her strength to contain or restrain a storm of emotion, so that she could speak. When she did, it was in a low voice and a little roughly. “I need the bond,” she said. “The real one. Body and mind and all the years of life. Nothing else. Nothing less.”

She glanced up at him with defiance, it might have been hatred.

Joy was rising mysteriously in him, like the sound and smell of the running water rising through the darkness. He had a feeling of unlimitedness, of clarity, total clarity, as if he had been set free. Behind Takver’s head the sky was brightening with moonrise; the far peaks floated clear and silver. “Yes, that’s it,” he said, without self-consciousness, without any sense of talking to someone else; he said what came into his head, meditatively. “I never saw it.”

There was a little resentment still in Takver’s voice. “You never had to see it”

“Why not?”

“I suppose because you never saw the possibility of it.”

“What do you mean, the possibility?”

“The person!”

He considered this. They sat about a meter apart, hugging their knees because it was getting cold. Breath came to the throat like ice water. They could see each other’s breath, faint vapor in the steadily growing moonlight.

“The night I saw it,” Takver said, “was the night before you left Northsetting Institute. There was a party, you remember. Some of us sat and talked all night. But that was four years ago. And you didn’t even know my name.” The rancor was gone from her voice; she seemed to want to excuse him.

“You saw in me, then, what I’ve seen in you this last four days?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell. It wasn’t just sexual. I’d noticed you before, that way. This was different; I saw you. But I don’t know what you see now. And I didn’t really know what I saw then. I didn’t know you well at all. Only, when you spoke, I seemed to see clear into you, into the center. But you might have been quite different from what I thought you were. That wouldn’t be your fault, after all,” she added. “It’s just that I knew what I saw in you was what I needed. Not just wanted!”

“And you’ve been in Abbenay for two years, and didn’t—”

“Didn’t what? It was all on my side, in my head, you didn’t even know my name. One person can’t make a bond, after all!”

“And you were afraid that if you came to me I might not want the bond.”

“Not afraid. I knew you were a person who… wouldn’t be forced… Well, yes, I was afraid. I was afraid of you. Not of making a mistake. I knew it wasn’t a mistake. But you were — yourself. You aren’t like most people, you know. I was afraid of you because I knew you were my equal!” Her tone as she ended was fierce, but in a moment she said very gently, with kindness, “It doesn’t really matter, you know, Shevek.”

It was the first time he had heard her say his name. He turned to her and said stammering, almost choking, “Doesn’t matter? First you show me — you show me what matters, what really matters, what I’ve needed all my life — and then you say it doesnt matter!”

They were face to face now, but they had not touched. “Is it what you need, then?”