Vea was at his arm. “Come along this way,” she said, laughing a little and breathless. He followed her as she threaded her way through the people. He now felt his face was very pale, and the dizziness did not pass; he hoped she was taking him to the washroom, or to a window where he could breathe fresh air. But the room they came into was large and dimly lit by reflection. A high, white bed bulked against the wall; a looking-glass covered half an other wall. There was a close, sweet fragrance of draperies, linens, the perfume Vea used.
“You are too much,” Vea said, bringing herself directly before him and looking up into his face, in the dimness, with that breathless laugh. “Really too much — you are impossible — magnificent!” She put her hands on his shoulders. “Oh, the looks on their faces! I’ve got to kiss you for that!” And she lifted herself on tiptoe, presenting him her mouth, and her white throat, and her naked breasts.
He took hold of her and kissed her mouth, forcing her head backward, and then her throat and breasts. She yielded at first as if she had no bones, then she writhed a little, laughing and pushing weakly at him, and began to talk. “Oh, no, no, now behave,” she said. “Now, come on, we do have to go back to the party. No, Shevek, now calm down, this won’t do at all!” He paid no attention. He pulled her with him toward the bed, and she came, though she kept talking. He fumbled with one hand at the complicated clothes he was wearing and managed to get his trousers unfastened. Then there was Vea’s clothing, the lowslung but tight-fitted skirt band, which he could not loosen. “Now, stop,” she said. “No, now listen, Shevek, it won’t do, not now, I haven’t taken a contraceptive, if I got stuffed I’d be in a pretty mess, my husband’s coming back in two weeks! No, let me be,” but he could not let her be; his face was pressed against her soft, sweaty, scented flesh. “Listen, don’t mess up my clothes, people will notice, for heaven’s sake. Wait — just wait, we can arrange it, we can fix up a place to meet, I do have to be careful of my reputation, I can’t trust the maid, just wait, not now — Not now! Not now!” Frightened at last by his blind urgency, his force, she pushed at him as hard as she could, her hands against his chest. He took a step backward, confused by her sudden high tone of fear and her struggle; but he could not stop, her resistance excited him further. He gripped her to him, and his semen spurted out against the white silk of her dress.
“Let me go! Let me go!” she was repeating in the same high whisper. He let her go. He stood dazed. He fumbled at his trousers, trying to close them. “I am — sorry — I thought you wanted—”
“For God’s sake!” Vea said, looking down at her skirt in the dim light, twitching the pleats away from her. “Really! Now I’ll have to change my dress.”
Shevek stood, his mouth open, breathing with difficulty, his hands hanging; then all at once he turned and blundered out of the dim room. Back in the bright room of the party he stumbled through the crowded people, tripped over a leg, found his way blocked by bodies, clothes, jewels, breasts, eyes, candle flames, furniture. He ran up against a table. On it lay a silver platter on which tiny pastries stuffed with meat, cream, and herbs were arranged in concentric circles like a huge pale flower. Shevek gasped for breath, doubled up, and vomited all over the platter.
“I’ll take him home,” Pae said.
“Do, for heaven’s sake,” said Vea. “Were you looking for him, Saio?”
“Oh, a bit. Fortunately Demaere called you.”
“You are certainly welcome to him.”
“He won’t be any trouble. Passed out in the hall. May I use your phone before I go?”
“Give my love to the Chief,” Vea said archly.
Oiie had come to his sister’s flat with Pae, and left with him. They sat in the middle seat of the big Government limousine that Pae always had on call, the same one that had brought Shevek from the space port last summer. He now lay as they had dumped him on the back seat.
“Was he with your sister all day, Demaere?”
“Since noon, apparently.”
“Thank God!”
“Why are you so worried about his getting into the slums? Any Odonian’s already convinced we’re a lot of oppressed wage slaves, what’s the difference if he sees a bit of corroboration?”
“I don’t care what he sees. We don’t want him seen. Have you been reading the birdseed papers? Or the broadsheets that were circulating last week in Old Town, about the ‘Forerunner’? The myth — the one who comes before the millennium — ‘a stranger, an outcast, an exile, bearing in empty hands the time to come.’ They quoted that. The rabble are in one of their damned apocalyptic moods. Looking for a figurehead. A catalyst. Talking about a general strike. They’ll never learn. They need a lesson all the same. Damned rebellious cattle, send them to fight Thu, it’s the only good we’ll ever get from them.”
Neither man spoke again during the ride.
The night watchman of the Senior Faculty House helped them get Shevek up to his room. They loaded him onto the bed. He began to snore at once.
Oiie stayed to take off Shevek’s shoes and put a blanket over him. The drunken man’s breath was foul; Oiie stepped away from the bed, the fear and the love he felt for Shevek rising up in him, each strangling the other. He scowled, and muttered, “Dirty fool.” He snapped the light off and returned to the other room. Pae was standing at the desk going through Shevek’s papers.
“Leave off,” Oiie said, his expression of disgust deepening. “Come on. It’s two in the morning. I’m tired.”
“What has the bastard been doing, Demaere? Still nothing here, absolutely nothing. Is he a complete fraud? Have we been taken in by a damned naive peasant from Utopia? Where’s his theory? Where’s our instantaneous spaceflight? Where’s our advantage over the Hainish? Nine, ten months We’ve been feeding the bastard, for nothing!” Nevertheless he pocketed one of the papers before he followed Oiie to the door.
Chapter 8
They were out on the athletic fields of Abbenay’s North Park, six of them, in the long gold and beat and dust of the evening. They were all pleasantly replete, for dinner had gone on most of the afternoon, a street festival and feast with cooking over open fires. It was the midsummer holiday, Insurrection Day, commemorating the first great uprising in Nio Esseia in the Urrasti year 740, nearly two hundred years ago. Cooks and refectory workers were honored as the guests of the rest of the community on that day, because a syndicate of cooks and waiters had begun the strike that led to the insurrection. There were many such traditions and festivals on Anarres, some instituted by the Settlers and others, like the harvest homes and the Feast of the Solstice, that had risen spontaneously out of the rhythms of life on the planet and the need of those who work together to celebrate together.
They were talking, all rather desultorily except for Tak-ver. She had danced for hours, eaten quantities of fried bread and pickles, and was feeling very lively. “Why did Kvigot get posted to the Reran Sea fisheries, where he’ll have to start all over again, while Turib takes on his research program here?” she was saying. Her research syndicate had been assimilated into a project managed directly by PDC, and she had become a strong partisan of some of Bedap’s ideas. “Because Kvigot is a good biologist who doesn’t agree with Simas’s fuddy-duddy theories, and Turib is a nothing who scrubs Simas’s back in the baths. See who takes over directing the program when Simas retires. She will, Turib will, I’ll bet you!”
“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.