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 dear, 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 the 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 moonlight. 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.
SHEVEK found a letter in a pocket of the new, fleecelined coat he had ordered for winter from the shop in the nightmare street. He had no idea how the letter had got there. It certainly had not been in the mail delivered to him thrice daily, which consisted entirely of manuscripts and reprints from physicists all over Urras, invitations to receptions, and artless messages from schoolchildren. This was a flimsy piece of paper stuck down to itself without envelope; it bore no stamp or frank from any of the three competing mail companies.
He opened it, vaguely apprehensive, and read: “If you are an Anarchist why do you work with the power system betraying your World and the Odonian Hope or are you here to bring us that Hope. Suffering from injustice and repression we look to the Sister World the light of freedom in the dark night. Join with us your brothers!” There was no signature, no address.
It shook Shevek both morally and intellectually, jolted him, not with surprise