“I ate too much.”

“A little walk might help.”

It was a very little walk: a slow ten-minute stroll over the grass, and then Vea collapsed gracefully in the shade of a high bank of shrubs, all bright with golden flowers. He sat down by her. A phrase Takver used came into his mind as he looked at Vea’s slender feet, decorated with little white shoes on very high heels. “A body profiteer,” Takver called women who used their sexuality as a weapon in a power struggle with men. To look at her, Vea was the body profiteer to end them all. Shoes, clothes, cosmetics, jewels, gestures, everything about her asserted provocation. She was so elaborately and ostentatiously a female body that she seemed scarcely to be a human being. She incarnated all the sexuality the Ioti repressed into their dreams, their novels and poetry, their endless paintings of female nudes, their music, their architecture with its curves and domes, their candies, their baths, their mattresses. She was the woman in the table.

Her head, entirely shaven, had been dusted with a talc containing tiny flecks of mica dust, so that a faint glitter obscured the nakedness of the contours. She wore a flimsy shawl or stole, under which the forms and texture of her bare arms showed softened and sheltered. Her breasts were covered: Ioti women did not go outside with naked breasts, reserving their nudity for its owners. Her wrists were laden with gold bracelets, and in the hollow of her throat a single jewel shone blue against the soft skin.

“How does that stay there?”

“What?” Since she could not see the jewel herself she could pretend to be unaware of it, obliging him to point, perhaps to bring his hand up over her breasts to touch the jewel. Shevek smiled, and touched it. “It is glued on?”

“Oh, that. No, I’ve got a tiny little magnet set in there, and it’s got a tiny little bit of metal on the back, or is it the other way round? Anyhow, we stick together.”

“You have a magnet under your skin?” Shevek inquired with unsophisticated distaste.

Vea smiled and removed the sapphire so he could see that there was nothing but the tiniest silver dimple of a scar. “You do disapprove of me so totally—it’s refreshing. I feel that whatever I say or do, I can’t possibly lower myself in your opinion, because I’ve already reached bottom!”

“That is not so,” he protested. He knew she was playing, but knew few of the rules of the game.

“No, no; I know moral horror when I see it. Like this.” She put on a dismal scowl; they both laughed. “Am I so different from Anarresti women, really?”

“Oh, yes, really.”

“Are they all terribly strong, with muscles? Do they wear boots, and have big flat feet, and sensible clothing, and shave once a month?”

“They don’t shave at all.”

“Never? Not anywhere? Oh, Lord! Let’s talk about something else.”