I could not in conscience refuse now. I went and talked to them at Divlab and also read their project sent in to Ecology at PDC, and it is true they need me because I have worked exactly on this algae-cm’ate-shrimp-kukuri cycle. I requested at Divlab that you be posted to Rolny but of course they won’t act on that until you also request it, and if this is not possible because of work at the Inst. then you won’t After all if it goes on too long I will tell them get another geneticist, and come back! Sadik is very well and can say yite for light. It will not be very long. All, for life, your sister, Takver. Oh please come if you can.
The other note was scribbled on a tiny bit of paper: “Shevek: Physics off. on yr return. Sabul.”
Shevek roamed around the room. The storm, the impetus that had hurled him through the streets, was still in him. It had come up against the wall. He could go no further, yet he must move. He looked in the closet. Nothing was in it but his whiter coat and a shirt which Takver, who liked fine handwork, had embroidered for him; her few clothes were gone. The screen was folded back, showing the empty crib. The sleeping platform was not made up, but the orange blanket covered the rolled-up bedding neatly. Shevek came up against the table again, read Takver’s letter again. His eyes filled with tears of anger. A rage of disappointment shook him, a wrath, a foreboding.
No one was to blame. That was the worst of it. Takver was needed, needed to work against hunger — hers, his, Sadik’s hunger. Society was not against them. It was for them; with them; it was them.
But he had given up his book, and his love, and his child. How much can a man be asked to give up?
“Hell!” he said aloud. Pravic was not a good swearing language. It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist. “Oh, hell!” he repeated. He crumpled up Sabul’s grubby little note vindictively, and then brought his hands down clenched against the edge of the table, twice, three times, in his passion seeking pain. But there was nothing. There was nothing to be done and nowhere to be gone. He was left at last with the bedding to unroll, with lying down alone and getting to sleep, with evil dreams and without comfort.
First thing in the morning, Bunub knocked. He met her at the door and did not stand aside to het her in. She was their neighbor down the hall, a woman of fifty, a machinist in the Air Vehicle Engine factory. Takver had always been entertained by her, but she infuriated Shevek. For one thing, she wanted their room. She had claimed it when it first came vacant, she said, but the enmity of the block housing registrar had prevented her getting it Her room did not have the corner window, the object of her undying envy. It was a double, though, and she, lived alone in it, which, given the housing shortage, was egoistic of her; but Shevek would never have wasted time on disapproving her if she had not forced him by making excuses. She explained, explained. She had a partner, a lifelong partner, “just like you two,” simper. Only where was the partner? Somehow he was always spoken of in the past tense. Meanwhile the double room was pretty well justified by the succession of men that passed through Bunub’s door, a different man every night, as if Bunub were a roaring girl of seventeen. Takver observed the procession with admiration. Bunub came and told her all about the men, and complained, complained. Her not having the corner room was only one among unnumbered grievances. She had a mind both insidious and invidious, which could find the bad in anything and take it straight to her bosom. The factory where she worked was a poisonous mass of incompetence, favoritism, and sabotage. Meetings of her syndicate were bedlams of unrighteous innuendo all directed at her. The entire social organism was dedicated to the persecution of Bunub. All this made Takver laugh, sometimes wildly, right in Bunub’s face. “Oh, Bunub, you are so funny!” she would gasp and the woman, with greying hair and a thin mouth and downcast eyes, would smile thinly, not offended, not at all, and continue her monstrous recitations. Shevek knew that Takver was right to laugh at her, but he could not do it.
“It’s terrible,” she said, slithering in past him and going straight to the table to read Takver’s letter. She picked it up; Shevek plucked it out of her hand with a calm rapidity she had not prepared for. “Perfectly terrible. Not even a decad’s notice. Just, ‘Come here! Right now!’ And they say we’re free people, we’re supposed to be free people. What a joke! Breaking up a happy partnership that way. That’s why they did it, you know. They’re against partnerships, you can see it all the time, they intentionally post partners apart. That’s what happened with me and Labeks, exactly the same thing. We’ll never get back together. Not with the whole of Divlab lined up against us. There’s the little empty crib. Poor little thing! She never ceased crying these four decads, day and night. Kept me awake for hours. It’s the shortages, of course; Takver just didn’t have enough milk. And then to send a nursing mother off to a posting hundreds of miles away like that, imagine! I don’t suppose you’ll be able to join her there, where is it they sent her to?”
“Northeast. I want to get over to breakfast, Bunub. I’m hungry.”
“Isn’t it typical how they did it while you were away.”
“Did what while I was away?”
“Sent her away — broke up the partnership.” She was reading Sabul’s note, which she had uncrumpled with care. “They know when to move inl I suppose you’ll be leaving this room now, won’t you? They won’t let you keep a double. Takver talked about coming back soon, but I could see she was just trying to keep her spirits up. Freedom, we’re supposed to be free, big joke! Pushed around from here to there—”
“Oh, by damn, Bunub, if Takver hadn’t wanted the posting she’d have refused it. You know we’re facing a famine.”
“Well. I wondered if she hadn’t been looking for a. move. It often happens after a baby comes. I thought long ago you should have given that baby to a nursery. The amount it cried. Children come between partners. Tie them down. It’s only natural, as you say, that she should have been looking for a change, and jumped at it when she got it.”
“I did not say that. I’m going to breakfast.” He strode out, quivering at five or six sensitive spots which Bunub had accurately wounded. The horror of the woman was that she voiced all his own most despicable fears. She now stayed behind in the room, probably to plan her move into it.
He had overslept, and got to commons just before they closed the doors. Ravenous still from the journey, he took a double helping of both porridge and bread. The boy behind the serving tables looked at him frowning. These days nobody took double helpings. Shevek stared frown-Ing back and said nothing. He had gone eighty-odd hours now on two bowls of soup and one kilo of bread, and he had a right to make up for what he had missed, but he was damned if he would explain. Existence is its own justification, need is right. He was an Odonian, he left guilt to profiteers.
He sat down by himself, but Desar joined him immediately, smiling, staring at or beside him with disconcerting wall eyes. “Been gone while,” Desar said.
“Farm draft. Six decads. How have things been here?”
“Lean.”
“They’ll get leaner,” Shevek said, but without real conviction, for he was eating, and the porridge tasted exceedingly good. Frustration, anxiety, famine! said his forebrain, seat of intellect; but his hindbrain, squatting in unrepentant savagery back in the deep skull’s darkness, said Food now! Food now! Good, good!
“Seen Sabul?”
“No. I got in late last night.” He glanced up at Desar and said with attempted indifference, “Takver got a famine posting; she had to leave four days ago.”