“Then can you change the presentation somehow? Disguise what you say. Decorate it with Sequency trimmings. So that hell accept it.”
“You can’t disguise black as white.”
She did not ask if he could bypass Sabul or go over his head. Nobody on Anarres was supposed to be over anybody’s head. There were no bypasses. If you could not work in solidarity with your syndics, you worked alone.
“What if…” She stopped. She got up and put her boots by the heater to dry. She took off her coat, hung it up, and put a heavy hand-loomed shawl over her shoulders. She sat down on the bed platform, grunting a little as she lowered herself the last few inches. She looked up at Shevek, who sat in profile between her and the windows,
“What if you offered to let him sign as co-author? Like the first paper you wrote.”
“Sabul won’t put his name to’superstitious-religious speculations.’”
“Are you sure? Are you sure that isn’t just what he wants? He knows what this is, what you’ve done. You’ve always said he’s shrewd. He knows it’ll put him and the whole Sequency school in the recycle bin. But if he could share with you, share the credit? Ail he is, is ego. If he could say that it was his book…”
Shevek said bitterly, “I’d as soon share you with him as that book.”
“Don’t look at it that way, Shev. It’s the book that’s important — the ideas. Listen. We want to keep this child to be born with us as a baby, we want to love it. But if for some reason it would die if we kept it, it could only live in a nursery, if we aever could set eyes on it or know its name — if we had that choice, which would we choose? To keep the stillborn? Or to give life?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He put his head in his hands, rubbing his forehead painfully. “Yes, of course. Yes. But this — But I—”
“Brother, dear heart,” Takver said. She clenched her hands together on her lap, but she did not reach out to him. “It doesn’t matter what name is on the book. People will know. The truth is the book.”
“I am that book,” he said. Then lie shut his eyes, and sat motionless. Takver went to him then, timidly, touching him as gently as if she touched a wound.
Early in the year 164 the first, incomplete, drastically edited version of the Principles of Simultaneity was printed in Abbenay, with Sabul and Shevek as joint authors. PDC was printing only essential records and directives, but Sabul had influence at the Press and in the Information division of PDC, and had persuaded them of the propaganda value of the book abroad. Unas, he said, was rejoicing over the drought and possible famine on Anarres; the last shipment of Ioti journals was full of gloating prophecies of the imminent collapse of the Odonian economy. What better denial, said Sabul, than the publication of a major work of pure thought, “a monument of science,” he said in his revised critique, “soaring above material adversity to prove the unquenchable vitality of the Odonian Society and its triumph over archist propertarian-ism in every area of human thought.”
So the work was printed; and fifteen of the three hundred copies went aboard the Ioti freighter Mindful. Shevek never opened a copy of the printed book. In the export packet, however, he put a copy of the original, complete manuscript, handwritten. A note on the cover asked that it be given to Dr. Atro of the College of the Noble Science of Ieu Eun University, with the compliments of the author. It was certain that Sabul, who gave final approval to the packet, would notice the addition. Whether he took the manuscript out or left it in, Shevek did not know. He might confiscate it out of spite; he might let it go, knowing that his emasculated abridgment would not have the desired effect on Urrasti physicists. He said nothing about the manuscript to Shevek. Shevek did not ask about it.
Shevek said very little to anyone, that spring. He took on a volunteer posting, construction work on a new water-recycling plant in South Abbenay, and was away at that work or teaching most of the day. He returned to his studies in subatomics, often spending evenings at the-Institute’s accelerator or the laboratories with the particle specialists. With Takver and their friends he was quiet, sober, gentle, and cold.
Takver got very big in the belly and walked like a person carrying a large, heavy basket of laundry. She-stayed at work at the fish labs till she had found and trained an adequate replacement for herself, then she came home and began labor, more than a decad past her time. Shevek arrived home in midafternoon. “You might go fetch the midwife,” Takver said. “Tell her the contractions are four or five minutes apart, but they’re not speeding up much, so don’t hurry very much.”
He hurried, and when the midwife was out, he gave way to panic. Both the midwife and the block medic were out, and neither had left a note on the door saying where they could be found, as they usually did. Shevek’s heart began pounding in his chest, and he saw things suddenly with a dreadful clarity. He saw that this absence of help was an evil omen. He had withdrawn from Takver since the winter, since the decision about the book. She had been increasingly quiet, passive, patient. He understood that passivity now: it was a preparation for her death. It was she who had withdrawn from him, and he had not tried to follow her. He had looked only at his own bitterness of heart, and never at her fear, or courage. He had let her alone because he wanted to be let alone, and so she had gone on, gone far, too far, would go on alone, forever.
He ran to the block clinic, arriving so out of breath and unsteady on his legs that they thought he was having a heart attack. He explained. They sent a message off to another midwife and told him to go home, the partner would be wanting company. He went home, and at every stride the panic in him grew, the terror, the certainty of loss.
But once there he could not kneel by Takver and ask her forgiveness, as he wanted desperately to do. Takver had no time for emotional scenes; she was busy. She had cleared the bed platform except for a clean sheet, and she was at work bearing a child. She did not howl or scream, as she was not in pain, but when each contraction came she managed it by muscle and breath control, and then let out a great houff of breath, like one who makes a terrific effort to lift a heavy weight. Shevek had never seen any work that so used all the strength of the body.
He could not look on such work without trying to help in it. He could serve as handhold and brace when she needed leverage. They found this arrangement very quickly by trial and error, and kept to it after the midwife bad come in. Takver gave birth afoot, squatting, her face against Shevek’s thigh, her hands gripping his braced arms. “There you are,” the midwife said quietly under th hard, engine-like pounding of Takver’s breathing, and she took the slimy but recognizably human creature that had appeared. A gush of blood followed, and an amorphous mass of something not human, not alive. The terror he had forgotten came back into Shevek redoubled. It was death he saw. Takver had let go his arms and was huddled down quite limp at his feet. He bent over her, stiff with horror and grief.
“That’s it,” said the midwife, “help her move aside so I can clean this up.”
“I want to wash,” Takver said feebly.
“Here, help her wash up. Those are sterile cloths — there.”
“Waw, waw, waw,” said another voice.
The room seemed to be full of people.
“Now then,” the midwife said. “Here, get that baby back with her, at the breast, to help shut off the bloodflow. I want to get this placenta to the freezer in the clinic. I’ll be ten minutes.”
“Where is— Where is the—”
“In the crib!” said the midwife, leaving. Shevek located the very small bed, which had been standing ready in the corner for four decads, and the infant in it Somehow in this extreme rush of events the midwife had found time to clean the infant and even put a gown on it, so that it was not so fishlike and slippery as when he had seen it first. The afternoon had got dark, with the same peculiar rapidity and lack of time lapse. The lamp was on. Shevek picked up the baby to take it to Takver. Its face was incredibly small, with large, fragile-looking, closed eyelids. “Give it here,” Takver was saying. “Oh, do hurry up, please give it to me.”