community of Round Valley, and had assisted the planning dietician in the town refectory. There was nothing unusual in all this, and Takver thought little of it, but it had of course formed certain elements in her character and opinions. Shevek was glad he had done his share of Kleggich, for Takver was contemptuous of people who evaded physical labor. “Look at Tinan,” she would say, “whining and howling because he got a draft posting for four decads to a root-holum harvest. He’s so delicate you’d think he was a fish egg! Has he ever touched dirt?” Takver was not particularly charitable, and she had a hot temper.
She had studied biology at Northsetting Regional Institute, with sufficient distinction that she had decided to come to the Central Institute for further study. After a year she had been asked to join in a new syndicate that was setting up a laboratory to study techniques of increasing and improving the edible fish stocks in the three oceans of Anarres. When people asked her what she did she said, “I’m a fish geneticist.” She liked the work; it combined two things she valued: accurate, factual research and a specific goal of increase or betterment. Without such work she would not have been satisfied. But it by no means sufficed her. Most of what went on in Takver’s mind and spirit had little to do with fish genetics.
Her concern with landscapes and living creatures was passionate. This concern, feebly called “love of nature,” seemed to Shevek to be something much broader than love. There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.
She showed Shevek the sea-water tanks at the research laboratory, fifty or more species of fish, large and small, drab and gaudy, elegant and grotesque. He was fascinated and a little awed.
The three oceans of Anarres were as full of animal life as the land was empty of it. The seas had not been connected for several million years, so their life forms had followed insular courses of evolution. Their variety was bewildering. It had never occurred to Shevek that life could proliferate so wildly, so exuberantly, that indeed exuberance was perhaps the essential quality of life.
On land, the plants got on well enough, in their sparse and spiny fashion, but those animals that had tried air-breathing had mostly given up the project as the planet’s climate entered a millennial era of dust and dryness. Bacteria survived, many of them lithophagous, and a few hundred species of worm and crustacean.
Man fitted himself with care and risk into this narrow ecology. If he fished, but not too greedily, and if he cultivated, using mainly organic wastes for fertilizer, he could fit in. But he could not fit anybody else in. There was no grass for herbivores. There were no herbivores for carnivores. There were no insects to fecundate flowering plants; the imported fruit trees were all hand-fertilized. No animals were introduced from Urras to imperil the delicate balance of life. Only the Settlers came, and so well scrubbed internally and externally that they brought a minimum of their personal fauna and flora with them. Not even the flea had made it to Anarres.
“I like marine biology,” Takver said to Shevek in front of the fish tanks, “because it’s so complex, a real web. This fish eats that fish eats small fry eat ciliates eat bacteria and round you go. On land, there’s only three phyla, all nonchordates—if you don’t count man. It’s a queer situation, biologically speaking. We Anarresti are unnaturally isolated. On the Old World there are eighteen phyla of land animal; there are classes, like the insects, that have so many species they’ve never been able to count them, and some of those species have populations of billions. Think of it: everywhere you looked animals, other creatures, sharing the earth and air with you. You’d feel so much more a part.” Her gaze followed the curve of a small blue fish’s flight through the dim tank. Shevek, intent, followed the fish’s track and her thought’s track. He wandered among the tanks for a long time, and often came back with her to the laboratory and the aquaria, submitting his physicist’s arrogance