Most Anarresti worked five to seven hours a day, with two to four days off each decad. Details of regularity, punctuality, which days off, and so on were worked out between the individual and his work crew or gang or syndicate or coordinating federative, on whichever level cooperation and efficiency could best be achieved. Takver ran her own research projects, but the work and the fish had their own imperative demands; she spent from two to ten hours a day at the laboratory, no days off. Shevek had two teaching posts now, an advanced math course in a learning center and another at the Institute. Both courses were in the morning, and he got back to the room by noon. Usually Takver was not back yet. The building was quite silent. The sunlight had not yet worked round to the double window that looked south and west over the city and the plains; the room was cool and shadowed. The delicate concentric mobiles hanging at different levels overhead moved with the introverted precision, silence, mystery of the organs of the body or the processes of the reasoning mind. Shevek would sit down at the table under the windows and begin to work, reading or making notes or calculating. Gradually the sunlight entered, shifted across the papers on the table, across his hands on the papers, and filled the room with radiance. And he worked. The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be groundwork, foundations, laid in the dark but well laid. On these, methodically and carefully but with a deftness and certainty that seemed nothing of his own but a knowledge working through him, using him as its vehicle, he built up the beautiful steadfast structure of the Principles of Simultaneity.
Takver, like any man or woman who undertakes companionship of the creator spirit, did not always have an easy time of it. Although her existence was necessary to Shevek her actual presence could be a distraction. She didn’t like to get home too early, because he often quit working when she got home, and she felt this to be wrong. Later on, when they were middle-aged and stodgy, he could ignore her, but at twenty-four he couldn’t. Therefore she arranged her tasks in the laboratory so that she did not get home till midafternoon. This was not a perfect arrangement either, for he needed looking after. On days when he had no classes, when she came in he might have been sitting at the table for six or eight hours straight. When he got up he would lurch with fatigue, his hands would shake, and he was scarcely coherent. The usage the creator spirit gives its vessels is rough, it wears them out, discards them, gets a new model. For Takver there were no replacements, and when she saw how hard Shevek was used she protested. She would have cried out as Odo’s husband, Asieo, did once, “For God’s sake, girl, can’t you serve Truth a little at a time?” — except that she was the girl, and was unacquainted with God.
They would talk, go out for a walk or to the baths, then to dinner at the Institute commons. After dinner there were meetings, or a concert, or they saw their friends, Bedap and Salas and their circle, Desar and others from the Institute, Takver’s colleagues and friends. But the meetings and the friends were peripheral to them. Neither social nor sociable participation was necessary to them; their partnership was enough, and they could not hide the fact. It did not seem to offend the others. Rather the reverse. Bedap, Salas, Desar, and the rest came to them as thirsty people come to a fountain. The others were peripheral to them: but they were central to the others. They did nothing much; they were not more benevolent than other people or more brilliant talkers; and yet their friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing them presents — the small offerings that circulated among these people who possessed nothing and everything: a handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded with crimson garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters’ Federation workshop, a poem about love, a set of carved wooden buttons, a spiral shell from the Sorniba Sea. They gave the present to Takver, saying, “Here, Shev might like this for a paperweight,” or to Shevek, saying, “Here, Tak might like this color.” In giving they sought to share in what Shevek and Takver shared, and to celebrate, and to praise.
It was a long summer, warm and bright, the summer of the 160th year of the Settlement of Anarres. Plentiful rains in the spring had greened the Plains of Abbenay and laid the dust so that the air was unusually clear; the sun was warm by day and at night the stars shone thick. When the Moon was in the sky one could make out the coastlines of its continents clearly, under the dazzling white whorls of its clouds.
“Why does it look so beautiful?” Takver said, lying beside Shevek under the orange blanket, the light out. Over them the Occupations of Uninhabited Space hung, dim; out the window the full Moon hung, brilliant. “When we know that it’s a planet just like this one, only with a better climate and worse people — when we know they’re all propertarians, and fight wars, and make laws, and eat while others starve, and anyhow are all getting older and having bad luck and getting rheumatic knees and corns on their toes just like people here… when we know all that, why does it still look so happy — as if life there must be so happy? I can’t look at that radiance and imagine a horrid little man with greasy sleeves and an atrophied mind like Sabul living on it; I just can’t.”
Their naked arms and breasts were moonlit. The fine, faint down on Takver’s face made a blurring aureole over her features; her hair and the shadows were black. Shevek touched her silver arm with his silver hand, marveling at the warmth of the touch in that cool light.
“If you can see a thing whole,” he said, “it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
“That’s all right for Urras. Let it stay off there and be the moon — I don’t want it! But I’m not going to stand up on a gravestone and look down on life and say, ‘O lovely!’ I want to see it whole right in the middle of it, here, now. I don’t give a hoot for eternity.”
“It’s nothing to do with eternity,” said Shevek, grinning, a thin shaggy man of silver and shadow. “All you have to do to see life whole is to see it as mortal. I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?”
“Ah! your talk, your damned philosophy!”
“Talk? It’s not talk. It’s not reason. It’s hand’s touch. I touch the wholeness, I hold it. Which is moonlight, which is Takver? How shall I fear death? When I hold it, when I hold in my hands the light—”
“Don’t be propertarian,” Takver muttered.
“Dear heart, don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying. You are. Those are your tears.”
“I’m cold. The moonlight’s cold.”
“Lie down.”
A great shiver went through his body as she took him in her arms.
“I am afraid, Takver,” he whispered.
“Brother, dear soul, hush.”
They slept in each other’s arms that night, many nights.