They would talk, go out for a walk or to the baths, then to dinner at the Institute commons. After dinner there were meetings, or a concert, or they saw their friends, Bedap and Salas and their circle, Desar and others from the Institute, Takver’s colleagues and friends. But the meetings and the friends were peripheral to them. Neither social nor sociable participation was necessary to them; their partnership was enough, and they could not hide the fact. It did not seem to offend the others. Rather the reverse. Bedap, Salas, Desar, and the rest came to them as thirsty people come to a fountain. The others were peripheral to them: but they were central to the others. They did nothing much; they were not more benevolent than other people or more brilliant talkers; and yet their friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing them presents—the small offerings that circulated among these people who possessed nothing and everything: a handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded with crimson garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters’ Federation workshop, a poem about love, a set of carved wooden buttons, a spiral shell from the Sorruba Sea. They gave the present to Takver, saying, “Here, Shev 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 clear, 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.