They were talking, all rather desultorily except for Takver. She had danced for hours, eaten quantities of fried bread and pickles, and was feeling very lively. “Why did Kvigot get posted to the Keran Sea fisheries, where he’ll have to start all over again, while Turib takes on his research program here?” she was saying. Her research syndicate had been assimilated into a project managed directly by PDC, and she had become a strong partisan of some of Bedap’s ideas. “Because Kvigot is a good biologist who doesn’t agree with Simas’s fuddyduddy theories, and Turib is a nothing who scrubs Simas’s back in the baths. See who takes over directing the program when Simas retires. She will, Turib will, I’ll bet you!”

“What does that expression mean?” asked somebody who felt indisposed for social criticism.

Bedap, who had been puffing on weight at the waist and was serious about exercise, was trotting earnestly around the playing field. The others were sitting on a dusty bank under trees, getting their exercise verbally.

“It’s an Iotic verb,” Shevek said. “A game the Urrasti play with probabilities. The one who guesses right gets the other one’s property.” He had long ago ceased to observe Sabul’s ban on mentioning his Iotic studies.

“How did one of their words get into Pravic?”

“The Settlers,” said another. “They had to learn Pravic as adults; they must have thought in the old languages for a long time. I read somewhere that the word damn isn’t in the Pravic Dictionary—it’s Iotic too. Farigv didn’t provide any swear words when he invented the language, or if he did his computers didn’t understand the necessity.”

“What’s hell, then?” Takver asked. “I used to think it meant the shit depot in the town where I grew up. ‘Go to hell!’ The worst place to go.”

Desar, the mathematician, who had now taken a permanent posting to the Institute staff, and who still hung around Shevek, though he seldom spoke to Takver, said in his cryptographic style, “Means Urras.”

“On Urras, it means the place you go to when you’re damned.”

“That’s a posting to Southwest in summer,” said Terrus, an ecologist, an old friend of Takver’s.

“It’s in the religious mode, in Iotic.”

“I know you have to read Iotic, Shev, but do you have to read religion?”

“Some of the old Urrasti physics is all in the religious mode. Concepts like that come up. ‘Hell’ means the place of absolute evil.”

“The manure depot in Round Valley,” Takver said. “I thought so.”

Bedap came pumping up, dust-whitened, sweat-streaked. He sat down heavily beside Shevek and panted.

“Say something in Iotic,” asked Richat, a student of Shevek’s. “What does it sound like?”

“You know: Hell! Damn!”

“But stop swearing at me,” said the girl, giggling, “and say a whole sentence.”

Shevek good-naturedly said a sentence in Iotic. “I don’t really know how it’s pronounced,” he added, “I just guess.”

“What did it mean?”

“If the passage of time is a feature of human consciousness, past and future are functions of the mind. From a pre-Sequentist, Keremcho.”